“LITERATURE
IS
MY
UTOPIA.”
Helen Keller
f
f
Why should students elect to take literature courses? What does learning to read literature add to our lives? These are great questions and they have some great answers.
Here are some thoughts by well-known authors about the value of reading literature, and some readings to get all of us thinking about that value in depth…from a literary perspective, of course.
Helen Keller
“Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.” From The Story of My Life
Jorge Luis Borges
“A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.” From “For Bernard Shaw.”
Orhan Pahuk
“I read a book one day and my whole life was changed. Even on the first page I was so affected by the book’s intensity I felt my body sever itself and pull away from the chair where I sat reading the book that lay before me on the table. But even though I felt my body dissociating, my entire being remained so concertedly at the table that the book worked its influence not only on my soul but on every aspect of my identity. It was such a powerful influence that the light surging from the pages illumined my face; its incandescence dazzled my intellect but also endowed it with brilliant lucidity. This was the kind of light within which I could recast myself; I could lose my way in this light; I already sensed in the light the shadows of an existence I had yet to know and embrace. I sat at the table, turning the pages, my mind barely aware that I was reading, and my whole life was changing as I read the new words on each new page. I felt so unprepared for everything that was to befall me, and so helpless, that after a while I moved my face away instinctively as if to protect myself from the power that surged from the pages. It was with dread that I became aware of the complete transformation of the world around me, and I was overtaken by a feeling of loneliness I had never before experienced–as if I had been stranded in a country where I knew neither the lay of the land nor the language and the customs.” From “The New Life” in The New York Times.
Julio Cortazar, “The Continuity of Parks”
“He had begun to read the novel a few days before….” KEEP READING!
Emily Dickinson, “There is no Frigate like a Book”
