Literature and Society

Why does literature exist in society? This fall I'll be teaching a course called "Literature and Society," and I've been thinking about this question as an overarching topic for the course. From the tales we tell every year at Thanksgiving dinner to Greek tragedies and political satires, stories play an important role in our lives. What constitutes literature? Why do we write it? Read it? How do audience, purpose, and genre figure in the answers to these questions? What do we mean by "society"? What role has literature played in your life? Can it have an effect on more than individuals? If so, how/why?

As I write this, I'm reminded of an assignment I've given and gotten that asks one to describe the literature that has been important to one's life over the years--one version of the "literacy autobiography." Perhaps this kind of assignment is the first step in engaging the larger question of literature's role in society.

One concern I have about broaching a topic like this in a course is that it's a common topic about which much has already been written. Is it inviting plagiarism to address this question? Or can that pitfall be avoided by changing the nature of the assignments? For example, the personal response I've recalled above can't be plagiarized; perhaps some kind of multimodal composition, like a website or movie, would also make dialing in a paper or downloading an essay more difficult.

For me, when I think of literature, I think of metaphor, the figure that distinguishes the literary from history's event or philosophy's concept (at least, according to Northrop Frye, although even he recognizes that there's overlap). If metaphor is distinctly literary, then one purpose of literature is to allow people to identify with experiences that are not their own, to see the creative connections between things that might otherwise appear distinct. The power of metaphor to make us see ourselves, each other, and the world differently is one reason I became an English teacher.