Journal 2

Last week you evaluated your reading process. This week, I want you to evaluate your relationship to literature. What do you think literature is? Why do you think that a literature course is required in college? Describe your feelings toward literature and your experiences with literature.



I have mixed feelings about literature. I think the idea of reading something and being able to gain a great deal from it intellectually is awesome. However, the idea of reading a 500 page novel with tons of fluff and an amazingly boring plotline is like being in prison to me. By definition, literature is imaginative creative writing, especially of recognized artistic value. To me, literature is a piece of work that has substance and worth. This is why a lot of times I do not mind reading literature. When I'm reading a piece of literature I am expecting to learn something useful from a character's experiences, or to escape my own world and fall into another. I have learned that reading literature and just reading in general helps to build your vocabulary and keep your mind running. I really like that about literature because having a broad vocabulary allows you to express exactly what and how you feel rather than generalizing it. I think it is also really great that it keeps my mind running because when I read I'm constantly thinking about how whatever happens in the story is relative to me and my life. It even helps me to think deeper about what's happening and how it can be symbolic of something else. Reading a piece of literature forces you to think analytically and to truly understand fully what is going on you have to be able to think outside of the box. You can learn so much about life from reading literature, whether it’s how an author uses a metaphor to symbolize something or the growth of a character; much of what is learned in literature can be applied in everyday life. Plus most scholarly people read often and that makes them well rounded. If you are in college, more than likely you are or will be a scholarly person who will have to interact with other scholarly people. Reading a lot of literature will help us to relate to other scholarly people because they might talk about a piece of literature or refer to it. With that said, that is probably why a literature course is required in college. However, I really do dislike literature sometimes because some books can be very very boring and extremely long. If a piece of literature is really long and boring most times, I do not really read too deeply into it and I do not really try to understand it.