OVERVIEW ON THE NATURE OF LITERATURE AND ITS GENRES

INTRODUCTION

Reading is one of the most challenging tasks among the macro-skills in English.

This is often commonly ignored by the students because of its disinteresting fact that it

entails time and consists of a lot of motivation and interest to inculcate it in the system of

a human being. Perhaps, being an English major requires a lot of reading, but it is

essential in a person’s growth because reading is utilized in all endeavor. In one of my

classes (as a student), my professor said that “when a teacher/parent taught the child to

read and become his/her hobby, half of his/her life is solved.” It was a bit jargon for me

(but it should not be) until I pondered for a long time that reading is always included in all

human activities. When filling-out forms, when studying, and other activities, reading is

always included.

However, Literature seems to be different from other forms of reading because it

touches the inner being and human logical capacity to munch the concepts within and to

view the world in a wider and deeper sense. It is more than the characters, settings, plot,

and language, but it transcends the contemporary issues that allow the readers to

converse with the world’s politics, economic, humanities, history, philosophy,

experiences, and a lot more. Literature speaks of a life that does not depend on the

author’s percepts but on the message that it tries to convey to be relevant in society. In

short, literature allows us to be human and be humane.

about it. This is the springboard towards why do we need to teach literature. I hope I have

spiced up (a bit) the discussion on literature and allowed you to awaken the curiosity on

what literature offers to every reader.

LEARNING OUTCOMES

At the end of this module, you are expected to:

1. explain the key concepts of literature and its umbrella

2. identify the various literary genres

3. reflect on the importance of literature

LESSON 1.1- NATURE OF LITERATURE

Literature is often ignored and is viewed by many teens as boring and

uninteresting, but some enjoyed it and made it a hobby. In addition, the love for the

literature is an often neglected activity by many, for it is deemed insignificant and less

prioritized because many also view it as a waste of time. However, people have not seen

that reading literature develops them cognitively, socially, emotionally, and academically

(Fraser-Thill, 2020). Through reading, critical thinking skills would improve a person’s

reasoning ability and widen their perspective. This hobby would be a great opportunity for

a person to improve one’s emotional quotient because as the person reads more, the

reader is exposed more to the diverse personalities. Thus, the emotional quotient is

developed because of the reader's interaction with the various characters that would build
a connection to each other that touches the emotion and sometimes, if not most of the

time, life.

Literature is generally defined as a written artistic-work and pertains specifically to

those with a high and lasting artistic value. (Literature, 2020) Moreover, literature pertains

to the body of written work and is usually linked to imaginative works of poetry and prose

and is perceived with aesthetic excellence in its craft (Rexroth, 2019). It is hard to capture

a concrete and specific definition of what literature is but allow me to share a simplified

definition that would encapsulate the idea and context as a whole, which I learned from

the lecture of my literature professor in college and masters and was compiled by Moreno

(2005).

“Literature is said to be the product of and a commentary on the life

process, literature being life itself. It is an oral or written record of man’s

thoughts, feelings, ideas, ideals, and aspirations which has stood the test

of time because of its universal appeal.”

This simplified version of my professor's definition provides a concept that literature

is surely not limited to writing but also to an oral record of man’s various life encounters

with the surroundings and with life itself. These experiences drawn from life are painted

through words that may color and inform the reader. However, the evidence of its

literariness is not its publication nor dissemination in all forms but with its existence
through time with a universal theme in which anyone and everyone can draw out a piece

of themselves from it.

READING ON LITERATURE

Below is an except on an essay written by Mario Vargas Llosa on “Why Literature?”

It has often happened to me, at book fairs or in bookstores, that a gentleman

approaches me and asks me for a signature. “It is for my wife, my young daughter, or my

mother,” he explains. “She is a great reader and loves literature.” Immediately I ask: “And

what about you? Don’t you like to read?” The answer is almost always the same: “Of

course I like to read, but I am a very busy person.” I have heard this explanation dozens

of times: this man and many thousands of men like him have so many important things

to do, so many obligations, so many responsibilities in life, that they cannot waste their

precious time buried in a novel, a book of poetry, or a literary essay for hours and hours.

According to this widespread conception, literature is a dispensable activity, no doubt lofty

and useful for cultivating sensitivity and good manners, but essentially an entertainment,

an adornment that only people with time for recreation can afford. It is something to fit in

between sports, the movies, a game of bridge or chess; and it can be sacrificed without

scruple when one “prioritizes” the tasks and the duties that are indispensable in the

struggle of life.

It seems clear that literature has become more and more a female activity. In

bookstores, at conferences or public readings by writers, and even in university

departments dedicated to the humanities, the women clearly outnumber the men. The
explanation traditionally given is that middle-class women read more because they work

fewer hours than men, and so many of them feel that they can justify more easily than

men the time that they devote to fantasy and illusion. I am somewhat allergic to

explanations that divide men and women into frozen categories and attribute to each sex

its characteristic virtues and shortcomings; but there is no doubt that there are fewer and

fewer readers of literature, and that among the saving remnant of readers women

predominate.

This is the case almost everywhere. In Spain, for example, a recent survey

organized by the General Society of Spanish Writers revealed that half of that country’s

population has never read a book. The survey also revealed that in the minority that does

read, the number of women who admitted to reading surpasses the number of men by

6.2 percent, a difference that appears to be increasing. I am happy for these women, but

I feel sorry for these men, and for the millions of human beings who could read but have

decided not to read.

They earn my pity not only because they are unaware of the pleasure that they are

missing, but also because I am convinced that a society without literature, or a society in

which literature has been relegated—like some hidden vice—to the margins of social and

personal life, and transformed into something like a sectarian cult, is a society condemned

to become spiritually barbaric, and even to jeopardize its freedom. I wish to offer a few

arguments against the idea of literature as a luxury pastime, and in favor of viewing it as

one of the most primary and necessary undertakings of the mind, an irreplaceable activity
for the formation of citizens in a modern and democratic society, a society of free

individuals.

We live in the era of the specialization of knowledge, thanks to the prodigious

development of science and technology and to the consequent fragmentation of

knowledge into innumerable parcels and compartments. This cultural trend is, if anything,

likely to be accentuated in years to come. To be sure, specialization brings many benefits.

It allows for deeper exploration and greater experimentation; it is the very engine of

progress. Yet it also has negative consequences, for it eliminates those common

intellectual and cultural traits that permit men and women to co-exist, to communicate, to

feel a sense of solidarity. Specialization leads to a lack of social understanding, to the

division of human beings into ghettos of technicians and specialists. The specialization of

knowledge requires specialized languages and increasingly arcane codes, as information

becomes more and more specific and compartmentalized. This is the particularism and

the division against which an old proverb warned us: do not focus too much on the branch

or the leaf, lest you forget that they are part of a tree, or too much on the tree, lest you

forget that it is part of a forest. Awareness of the existence of the forest creates the feeling

of generality, the feeling of belonging, that binds society together and prevents it from

disintegrating into a myriad of solipsistic particularities. The solipsism of nations and

individuals produces paranoia and delirium, distortions of reality that generate hatred,

wars, and even genocide.

the infinite richness of knowledge and the speed of its evolution, which have led to

specialization and its obscurities. But literature has been, and will continue to be, as long

as it exists, one of the common denominators of human experience through which human

beings may recognize themselves and converse with each other, no matter how different

their professions, their life plans, their geographical and cultural locations, their personal

circumstances. It has enabled individuals, in all the particularities of their lives, to

transcend history: as readers of Cervantes, Shakespeare, Dante, and Tolstoy, we

understand each other across space and time, and we feel ourselves to be members of

the same species because, in the works that these writers created, we learn what we

share as human beings, what remains common in all of us under the broad range of

differences that separate us. Nothing better protects a human being against the stupidity

of prejudice, racism, religious or political sectarianism, and exclusivist nationalism than

this truth that invariably appears in great literature: that men and women of all nations

and places are essentially equal, and that only injustice sows among them discrimination,

fear, and exploitation.

Nothing teaches us better than literature to see, in ethnic and cultural differences,

the richness of the human patrimony, and to prize those differences as a manifestation of

humanity’s multi-faceted creativity. Reading good literature is an experience of pleasure,

of course; but it is also an experience of learning what and how we are, in our human

integrity and our human imperfection, with our actions, our dreams, and our ghosts, alone

and in relationships that link us to others, in our public image and in the secret recesses

of our consciousness.
 This complex sum of contradictory truths—as Isaiah Berlin called them—

constitutes the very substance of the human condition. In today’s world, this totalizing and

living knowledge of a human being may be found only in literature. Not even the other

branches of the humanities—not philosophy, history, or the arts, and certainly not the

social sciences—have been able to preserve this integrating vision, this universalizing

discourse. The humanities, too, have succumbed to the cancerous division and

subdivision of knowledge, isolating themselves in increasingly segmented and technical

sectors whose ideas and vocabularies lie beyond the reach of the common woman and

man. Some critics and theofists would even like to change literature into a science. But

this will never happen, because fiction does not exist to investigate only a single ‘precinct

of experience. It exists to enrich through the imagination the entirety of human life, which

cannot be dismembered, disarticulated, or reduced to a series of schemas or formulas

without disappearing. This is the meaning of Proust’s observation that “real life, at last

enlightened and revealed, the only life fully lived, is literature.” He was not exaggerating,

nor was he expressing only his love for his own vocation. He was advancing the particular

proposition that as a result of literature life is better understood and better lived; and that

living life more fully necessitates living it and sharing it with others.

The brotherly link that literature establishes among human beings, compelling

them to enter into dialogue and making them conscious of a common origin and a

Common goal, transcends all temporal barriers. Literature transports us into the past and

links us to those who in bygone eras plotted, enjoyed, and dreamed through those texts

that have come down to Us, texts that now allow us also to enjoy and to dream. This
feeling of membership in the collective human experience across time and space is the

highest achievement of culture, and nothing contributes more to its renewal in every

generation than literature.

It always irritated Borges when he was asked, “What is the use of literature?” It

seemed to him a stupid question, to which he would reply: “No one would ask what is the

use of a canary’s song or a beautiful sunset.” If such beautiful things exist, and if, thanks

to them, life is even for an instant less ugly and less sad, is it not petty to seek practical

justifications? But the question is a good one. For novels and poems are not like the

sound of birdsong or the spectacle of the sun sinking into the horizon, because they were

not created by chance or by nature. They are human creations, and it is therefore

legitimate to ask how and why they came into the world, and what is their purpose, and

why they have lasted so long.

Literary works are born, as shapeless ghosts, in the intimacy of a writer’s

consciousness, projected into it by the combined strength of the unconscious, and the

writer’s sensitivity to the world around him, and the writer’s emotions; and it is these things

to which the poet or the narrator, in a struggle with words, gradually gives form, body,

movement, rhythm, harmony, and life. An artificial life, to be sure, a life imagined, a life

made of language-yet men and women seek out this artificial life, some frequently, others

sporadically, because real life falls short for them, and is incapable of offering them what

they want. Literature does not begin to exist through the work of a single individual. It
exists only when it is adopted by others and becomes a part of social life—when it

becomes, thanks to reading, a shared experience.

One of its first beneficial effects takes place at the level of language. A community

without a written literature expresses itself with less precision, with less richness of

nuance, and with less clarity than a community whose principal instrument of

communication, the word, has been cultivated and perfected by means of literary texts. A

humanity without reading. untouched by literature, would resemble a community of deaf-

mutes and aphasics, afflicted by tremendous problems of communication due to its crude

and rudimentary language. This is true for individuals, too. A person who does not read,

or reads little, or reads only trash, is a person with an impediment: he can speak much

but he will say little, because his vocabulary is deficient in the means for self-expression.

This is not only a verbal limitation. It represents also a limitation in intellect and in

imagination. It is a poverty of thought, for the simple reason that ideas, the concepts

through which we grasp the secrets of our condition, do not exist apart from words. We

learn how to speak correctly—and deeply, rigorously, and subtly—from good literature,

and only from good literature. No other discipline or branch of the arts can substitute for

literature in crafting the language that people need to communicate. To speak well, to

have at one’s disposal a rich and diverse language, to be able to find the appropriate

expression for every idea and every emotion that we want to communicate, is to be better

prepared to think, to teach, to learn, to converse, and also to fantasize, to dream, to feel.

In a surreptitious way, words reverberate in all our actions, even in those actions that
seem far removed from language. And as language evolved, thanks to literature, and

reached high levels of refinement and manners, it increased the possibility of human

enjoyment.

Literature has even served to confer upon love and desire and the sexual act itself

the status of artistic creation. Without literature, eroticism would not exist. Love and

pleasure would be poorer, they would lack delicacy and exquisiteness, they would fail to

attain to the intensity that literary fantasy offers. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that a

couple who have read Garcilaso, Petrarch, Gongora, or Baudelaire value pleasure and

experience pleasure more than illiterate people who have been made into idiots by

television’s soap operas. In an illiterate world, love and desire would be no different from

what satisfies animals, nor would they transcend the crude fulfillment of elementary

instincts.

Nor are the audiovisual media equipped to replace literature in this task of teaching

human beings to use with assurance and with skill the extraordinarily rich possibilities that

language encompasses. On the contrary, the audiovisual media tend to relegate words

to a secondary level with respect to images, which are the primordial language of these

media, and to constrain language to its oral expression, to its indispensable minimum, far

from its written dimension. To define a film or a television program as “literary” is an

elegant way of saying that it is boring. For this reason, literary programs on the radio or

on television rarely capture the public. So far as I know, the only exception to this rule

was Bernard Pivot’s program, Apostrophes, in France. And this leads me to think that not
only is literature indispensable for a full knowledge and a full mastery of language, but its

fate is linked also and indissolubly with the fate of the book, that industrial product that

many are now declaring obsolete.

This brings me to Bill Gates. He was in Madrid not long ago and visited the Royal

Spanish Academy, which has embarked upon a joint venture with Microsoft. Among other

things, Gates assured the members of the Academy that he would personally guarantee

that the letter “fl” would never be removed from computer software—a promise that

allowed four hundred million Spanish speakers on five continents to breathe a sigh of

relief, since the banishment of such an essential letter from cyberspace would have

created monumental problems. Immediately after making his amiable concession to the

Spanish language, however, Gates, before even leaving the premises of the Academy,

avowed in a press conference that he expected to accomplish his highest goal before he

died. That goal, he explained, is to put an end to paper and then to books.

In his judgment, books are anachronistic objects. Gates argued that computer

screens are able to replace paper in all the functions that paper has heretofore assumed.

He also insisted that, in addition to being less onerous, computers take up less space,

and are more easily transportable; and also that the transmission of news and literature

by these electronic media, instead of by newspapers and books, will have the ecological

advantage of stopping the destruction of forests, a cataclysm that is a consequence of

the paper industry. People will continue to read, Gates assured his listeners, but they will
read on computer screens, and consequently there will be more chlorophyll in the

environment.

I was not present at Gates’s little discourse; I learned these details from the press.

Had I been there I would have booed Gates for proclaiming shamelessly his intention to

send me and my colleagues, the writers of books, directly to the unemployment line. And

I would have vigorously disputed his analysis. Can the screen really replace the book in

all its aspects? I am not so certain. I am fully aware of the enormous revolution that new

technologies such as the Internet have caused in the fields of communication and the

sharing of information, and I confess that the Internet provides invaluable help to me every

day in my work; but my gratitude for these extraordinary conveniences does not imply a

belief that the electronic screen can replace paper, or that reading on a computer can

stand in for literary reading. That is a chasm that I cannot cross. I cannot accept the idea

that a non-functional or non-pragmatic act of reading, one that seeks neither information

nor a useful and immediate communication, can integrate on a computer screen the

dreams and the pleasures of words with the same sensation of intimacy, the same mental

concentration and spiritual isolation, that may be achieved by the act of reading a book.

Perhaps this a prejudice resulting from lack of practice, and from a long association of

literature with books and paper. But even though I enjoy surfing the Web in search of

world news, I would never go to the screen to read a poem by Gongora or a novel by

Onetti or an essay by Paz, because I am certain that the effect of such a reading would

not be the same. I am convinced, although I cannot prove it, that with the disappearance

of the book, literature would suffer a serious blow, even a mortal one. The term “literature”
would not disappear, of course. Yet it would almost certainly be used to denote a type of

text as distant from what we understand as literature today as soap operas are from the

tragedies of Sophocles and Shakespeare.

There is still another reason to grant literature an important place in the life of

nations. Without it, the critical mind, which is the real engine of historical change and the

best protector of liberty, would suffer an irreparable loss. This is because all good

literature is radical, and poses radical questions about the world in which we live. In all

great literary texts, often without their authors’ intending it, a seditious inclination is

present.

Literature says nothing to those human beings who are satisfied with their lot, who

are content with life as they now live it. Literature is the food of the rebellious spirit, the

promulgator of non-conformities, the refuge for those who have too much or too little in

life. One seeks sanctuary in literature so as not to be unhappy and so as not to be

incomplete. To ride alongside the scrawny Rocinante and the confused Knight on the

fields of La Mancha, to sail the seas on the back of a whale with Captain Ahab, to drink

arsenic with Emma Bovary, to become an insect with Gregor Samsa: these are all ways

that we have invented to divest ourselves of the wrongs and the impositions of this unjust

life, a life that forces us always to be the same person when we wish to be many different

people, so as to satisfy the many desires that possess us.

instant, in this provisional suspension of life, literary illusion lifts and transports us outside

of history, and we become citizens of a timeless land, and in this way immortal. We

become more intense, richer, more complicated, happier, and more lucid than we are in

the constrained routine of ordinary life. When we close the book and abandon literary

fiction, we return to actual existence and compare it to the splendid land that we have just

left. What a disappointment awaits us! Yet a tremendous realization also awaits us,

namely, that the fantasized life of the novel is better—more beautiful and more diverse,

more comprehensible and more perfect—than the life that we live while awake, a life

conditioned by the limits and the tedium of our condition. In this way, good literature,

genuine literature, is always subversive, unsubmissive, rebellious: a challenge to what

exists.

Source: https://newrepublic.com/article/78238/mario-vargas-llosa-literature