Literature & Society

What a great question! For me, it seems like a bellweather of social sentiment....are the rich portrayed as Simon LeGree (spelling errors for sure there) or some Ayn Rand hero? Are villians flawed characters representative of our temporary dark sides, or as inescapable evil incarnations? etc etc

The telling of stories explains our mysteries, calms our fears, gives us hope against adversity and provides a way to explore ourselves and our universe from the inside out.

Other than that, literature is fun, too.

Depends on how you define literature. How inclusive or exclusive you want to be with the term.

It's definitely been used as a propaganda tool. Although "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair did point out the horrors of the meat packing industry its original purpose was to promote communism.

When something's written, more thought is put into it than something oral. Speech is more off the top of the head, tip of the tongue, than the written word. For better or worse the written word is more refined than oral communication.

Mime...well...is cute. Painting, sculpute--good, but it seldom defines history in an objective way.

Another question: Is literature/art necessary?

Let's put it this way, if all the literature and art disappeared, humans could still survive. No one ever dies because he lacks art or books. Does literature or art only exist on this higher plane to nourish our souls and minds to set us apart from other animals? And if they're not fundamentally important to our survival (unlike, say, food, water, housing, or even jobs.. which brings money, which is important in our society in every way), do you think people tend to think they're indeed unimportant?

That is, if you give a teenager $50, chances are he will go buy another pair of jeans or a new video game. When is the last time he bought a book (outside of school) or a painting?

Sure, we could all live without books.

But we'd still be telling stories around the campfire. Humans are complex creatures, and even the most jaded of us, I believe, needs a touch of imagination -- a dose of "what if."

I think a person could actually die without some bit of creativity.

I think literature played a different and more important role in the past. Books, and the printed word in general, used to be the best way to widely disseminate ideas and information. Most of our shared cultural myths and attitudes now come more from TV, radio, and the movies than from the printed word.

The internet is an interesting case, though. Despite streaming videos and interactive sites, it still depends mostly on the written word to transmit its ideas. Will this change until it finally morphs into another media outlet? Hard to say.

I beat you by a hair, Birol!

Birol said:

That's the thing. Literature, storytelling, has been around in one form or another since humans first crawled out of the sludge. There were storytellers back when everyone's role in the community had some purpose necessary to the survival of the community. So, yes, somehow, I think literature is as necessary to our survival as food, water, shelter, and air.

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My thought is that food, water, etc. are essential for our survival, but literature (or storytelling, entertainment, etc.) are essential for us to evolve and improve: by encouraging our imaginations, by being creative (and all things creative, including scientific inventions, are related), by exchanging ideas and inspiring others. I think that's where art and literature come in -- to enlighten and inspire. So while they're not essential for our immediate survival, it's essential to our continuous existence and evolution.

A pragmatic and unsatisfying response would be that literature is more of a luxury than a necessity. But if we were to go there, the same could apply to things like love, happiness, and religion. These aren't scarce resources that we're competing over and it's perfectly true if not evident that we can live without them. (Some easier than others.)

We've long since evolved beyond a world of scarce resources, thanks to those large gray things between our ears. Literature functions now, I think, as a mortar between the cracks, if not the oil in the machine - now that there are so many of us doing so much with no directly apparent threat to our well-being, literature serves as a guide to how to coexist with each other and how to lead productive, fulfilling lives without, say, beating your neighbor to death with a shovel and stealing his wife and food. Literature changes as new problems and obstacles arise against satisfying coexistence.

I think this also goes hand in hand with just the idea of self-awareness. As we're the first species to become respectably self-aware, the first question we have to ask ourselves is, "Who are we?"

The rest is just a variation upon a theme.

Cool thread, Lori.

I don't have much to add, other than life would be awfully bland without art in all its forms, be it music, literature, sculpture, painting, and on and on. I don't think humans can be happy without at least some art in their lives.

Heck, the first caveman to come home and regale his mate with an exaggerated tale of how he killed supper was the first storyteller. Art, and literature in particular, is part of what we are.

Birol said:

TV, radio, and movies all start with an idea that is transmitted to others by the written word. The Greeks disseminated myths and attitudes to the masses not just through the written word but through plays, but the plays still had a writer.

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True, but there's a difference. Movies can be enjoyed by the illiterate; books cannot. "Hero is pursued on motorcycle through city streets" is a description, not literature. The film scenes that may result will be quite different.

I think you're saying that the written word is, and will always be, necessary. No argument there. But I think there's a difference between literature defined as words assembled on paper and literature defined as any creative medium which depends on the written word to exist.

Books make great door stops.


Especially my first two. . . what else to do with that manuscript?

I think we need to ask "necessary for what," because while we're all sitting around saying that literature is necessary, we probably don't agree on what.

The bare minimum circle of life goes like:

birth --> food --> sex --> dirtnap

There's no:

birth --> food --> existentialist crisis and re-evaluation of religious morality --> sex --> dirtnap

Spiny: I think you could even take out the sex. It's not absolutely necessary, at least on an individual level.

However, the human species would wither and die without it.

Same for literature?

The human species existed fine for quite a while before it could even speak. I'm not saying literature is useless, however. Quite the opposite.

EDIT: And I meant "procreation." "Sex" is just funnier sounding, as is "dirtnap."

Well, let's look at humans as animals, and not some higher level beings.

So let's examine that: yes, sex will be part of it. It's genetics. It's how we procreate and continue the species, but it's a very primitive urge/need. Birds do it. Bees do it.

Now examine stuff like communication, exchange, trading, social contacts, etc. They're also common among animals. So it seems like these are also basic needs.

But literature, art, religion, philosophy, etc. You don't see them in the animal kingdom. There's nothing common about them between humans and the other animals.

Art was never intended to separate itself from the normal flow of knowledge. It's a byproduct of knowledge in the sense that it uses what's known then attempts to reach outside the limits of what is known.

All forms of art starts with what we empirically know, then reaches for what we may eventually know.

Writing is not the purist of arts, but it's the most revealing