ABID, BAI ZAIDA L.

LIT 1N TTh 10:30-12:00

Prof. Bernardo U. Chua

Discussion Essay: Write 300-500 word discussion essay on the nature and scope of literature.

Literature’s central meaning is already clear enough. it's derived from the Latin word
“littera” which suggests “a letter of the alphabet”. Literature is also classified in line with a
spread of systems, including language, national origin, period, genre, and subject
material. Literature has traditionally been applied to those imaginative works of poetry and prose
distinguished by the intentions of their authors and also the perceived aesthetic excellence of
their execution. As an art, literature could be described because the organization of words to
administer pleasure. Yet through words literature elevates and transforms experience beyond
“mere” pleasure. Literature also functions more broadly in society as a way of both criticizing
and affirming cultural values. Furthermore, Literature may be defined as an expression of human
feelings, thoughts, and ideas whose medium is language, oral and written.

It is not only about human ideas, thoughts, and feelings but also about experiences of the
authors. Literature could be a variety of human expression. But not everything expressed in
words, even people who organized and written down is additionally counted as literature. Like as
an example those writings that are primarily informative, technical, scholarly and journalistic
would be excluded from the rank of literature by most but considered as critics. The purest
literary form is that the lyric, and after it comes elegiac, epic, dramatic, narrative, and expository
verse. Most theories of literary criticism base themselves on an analysis of poetry, because the
aesthetic problems of literature are there presented in their simplest and purest form. Poetry that
fails as literature isn't called poetry in the slightest degree but verse. Certainly, all the world’s
great novels are literature, but there are thousands that don't seem to be so considered. Most great
dramas are considered literature while the Chinese, possessors of 1 of the world’s greatest
dramatic traditions, consider their plays, with few exceptions, to possess no literary merit
whatsoever. The essay was once written deliberately as a bit of literature: its material was of
comparatively minor importance. 

Today most essays are written as expository, informative journalism, although there are
still essayists within the great tradition who think about themselves as artists. Now, as within the
past, a number of the best essayists are critics of literature, drama, and also the arts. Indeed, it
becomes more and harder to categorize literature, for in modern civilization words are
everywhere. Man is subject to a continual flood of communication. Most of it's fugitive, but here
and there—in high-level journalism, in television, within the cinema, in commercial fiction, in
westerns and detective stories, and in plain, expository prose—some writing, almost by chance,
achieves an aesthetic satisfaction, a depth and relevance that entitle it to square with other
samples of the art of literature.