Imaginative Literature Historicall

Historically, imaginative literature has often been an object under attack. Plato warned his fellow Greeks that literature could rouse their emotions to too high an intensity. His recommendation was to throw the poets out of the republic. The Puritans who lived during the age of Shakespeare cautioned against the adverse effects of literature, especially drama. Tolstoy during his period of Christian conversion observed that literature was dangerous since it appealed to man's lowest instincts. Yet literature has not perished. Instead, it has flourished across the centuries. This essay will seek to defend literature by answering the following questions: Why is literature valuable? Why should we study it? How does it change our lives?

Literature is valuable because it offers us a rare chance at developing self-knowledge not readily available in other forms. In Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants" a man and a woman are confronted with an unexpected pregnancy. Hemingway introduces this fact slowly allowing his development to match both the way the character and the readers come to see what has happened and what should be done. The brilliance of Hemingway's short story is that he shows the tensions which develop between this couple through their dialogue. His short story reminds the reader that we all speak between the lines. For the man has decided that the woman should have an abortion. He is willing to keep talking about it obliquely, but she decid

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odman Brown enters into the nearby woods. It is as if Hawthorne is suggesting that goodness can this easily be untied even as darkness slowly immerses us. Hawthorne exploits the symbolic ambiguity of literature when he asks "Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting?" (Perrine 313). Only literature can allow an individual to feel and to think simultaneously. In reading "Young Goodman Brown" the reader is forced into the same space of bewilderment as the protagonist. Hawthorne seems to have written the tale as a study of a young man's initiation into evil and his inability to escape its grasp for the remainder of his life. To study Hawthorne's tale is to realize that knowledge of life's uglier side must be confronted. Neither a newspaper account nor a history could grapple with this material in the powerful way which Hawthorne does. In "The Swimmer" John Cheever offers an amazing portrait of life in suburban America, one of the author's great literary achievements. Cheever offers a symbolical tale of a man who has drunk too much the night before. Now, hung over, he decides to plot his progress by swimming through a series of his neighbor's pools. After his post-alc

Category: Literature - I