How Literature Impacts Society Essay

How Literature Impacts Society BY 234 Literature has been crucial to communities since language was tailored and used by people as a form of communication. Literature takes the reader out of their world and brings them into the author’s world. It makes people think outside their normal box if you will. Literature can bring people of different backgrounds, cultures, and ways life together. When people relate through a piece of literature, it really makes you think that you’re not alone and that someone else has been through what you are going through. The way authors are able to grab you with how the characters are feeling or what they are looking at brings the reader into that story. If you read a piece of literature that contains information on other cultures you then see how they live, what works for them and what doesn’t. As a reader, we learn how other cultures live, which in turn makes us as a society think about the way that we live our own lives. In the â€Å"Lesson† the author really brings you into her world. She even goes as far as using the language that was used in the time by her and her peers. In this story the eaders are brought into a little girl’s world where poverty and its struggles are so clearly shown for the little girl as well as the other characters surrounding her. The author brings readers into the mind of the little girl and really showed her attitude which was she really did not care about anything and really seemed angry about her surrounding and angry at the people in her life. The reader can relate to this character even if their surroundings are different then the characters. The children were taken to upper class neighborhoods where they were shown a different way of ife. By taking the children to the high class toy store at first they were a little hesitant. â€Å"But what I got to be shamed about? Got as much right to go in as anybody’ (Diyannt, 2007, 431). Literature can bring readers from real life stories to dream like different world stories. Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis brings you into a dream world where a normal man turns into a huge insect. But in the story most memorable part is the fact that this man before he changed into a huge insect was such a good person. He cared for is family and had such an enormous heart for them. He worked hard every day so that his family could have a better life. He paid off his parent’s debt and the irony of the story is when he turned into an insect his family disowned him. They mistreated him and all they care about was how the bills were going to get paid. Even though this piece of literature is very dream like the main idea of this man being a workhorse for his family and finally when he needed them the most they disowned him. Readers of all societies can relate to how the main character felt. It’s very difficult as a person to understand how other people live their lives or why they do the things they do. Through literature authors make that possible for a reader to truly experience what another person is feeling and thinking. We as readers can travel back in time to see how societies were or we can travel around the world to see how people live in different parts of the world without leaving the knowledge and use it to better our own society. References DiYanni, R (2007) Literature: Reading Fiction, Poetry, and Drama (6th ed. ) New York: McGraw-Hill.