The Purpose of Literature

This semester, most of my classes focus on literature. In one, we are considering the Bible as a literary work. In another, we are soon to discuss what makes something worthy of canonization. In still another, we are learning about literary criticsm and I am developing my theory of literature.

The question has come up a lot: What is the purpose of literature?

It's not the easiest question to answer, and many people have come up with many different answers. Some written words are meant to entertain, some to inform, others to persuade.

But my theory is that literature, on the whole, has one primary and lofty goal (or at least the best of literature has this goal). And this theory is so poetically stated by Lord Byron (from whose words I adopted the title of this blog).

He wrote, "Words are things, and a small drop of ink, falling like dew upon a thought, produces that which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think."

I love it! Words are thoughts that are captured by the bright green ink on the diary page of a young girl, or by the virtual text passed in an email to an office administrator.

A work of literature is a collection of these words, a collection of thoughts, put on a page or in a book and handed to the world.

The best literature makes us think. Many poems and novels that I have read--some of the best--aren't tied up in a neat little package with a feel-good conclusion, a happy ending, and an explicit moral lesson.

The purpose of literature is to engage the reader's mind--get him thinking about himself, his life, his values--to think critically about what a book means.

Therein lies its value. Kids need to keep reading "the classics" in high school, colleges need to make a literature class a requisite, adults need to pick up more than a harlequin romance or last month's issue of Sports Illustrated.

We need more thinkers and less ignorance in the world. Literature can help with that.