ENG-1004

Instructor: Ms. Saadia Ashraf

Batch-Spring-2019
 Literature is the art of written works. Any art
form that uses language in either written or
spoken words.
 The word literature comes from French-
Phrase belles –letters, which means
“Beautiful writing”.
 Literature reflects the various experiences,
ideas, passions of human beings in their daily
life that express on several forms and styles of
literary works.
 Since literature directly derives from human
life, it can increase our knowledge and
experiences about human problems included
values, morals, cultures, and human interests.
After reading a literary work, the readers may
get a certain impression of what he/she has
read.
 Literature as a product of human culture has its
own functions. Literature has some functions.
 There is an intimate connection between literature
and life. It is, in fact, life which is the subject
matter of literature. Life provides the raw material
on which literature enforces an artistic form.
Literature, as we defined in the previous section,
is the communication of the writer’s experience of
life. But this connection between literature and
life is not so simple as it seems. This problem has
been discussed by some of the greatest literary
critics of the world, and their conclusions have
been sometimes contradictory.
 Plato, the great Greek philosopher, was the
first to give a serious thought to this
problem—the relation of literature to life. In
his discussions he referred mainly to
poetry.
 He regarded poetry as a mere ‘imitation’ of
life, and thus he judged the poets.
 According to him, true reality consists in the
ideas of things, of which individual objects
are but reflections or imitations.
 Forexample, when we say a black dog, a
good dog. we are comparing the dog
which we actually see with the ideal dog,
our idea of the dog, which is the true,
unchanging reality, while the dogs which
we name as black, good, are mere
reflections and imitations of that reality.
Thus the poet, who imitates those objects
which are themselves imitations of
reality.
 Paintingis an imitation of a specific
object or group of objects, and if it is
nothing but that, if reality lies not in
apprehending reality, the painter is not
doing anything particularly valuable. Just
as the painter only imitates what he sees
and does not know how to make or to use
what he sees (he could paint a bed, but
not make it), so the poet imitates reality
without necessarily understanding it.
 There is an obvious error in Plato’s
reasoning. Being too much of a philosopher
and moralist, he could not see clearly the
relation between literature and life. He is
right when he says that the poet produces
something which is less than reality it
purports to represent, but he does not
perceive that he also creates something
more than reality. This error was corrected
by Plato’s pupil, Aristotle.
 He agreed with Plato that poetry is an
imitation of reality, but according to him,
this imitation is the imaginative
reconstruction of life. Poetry is thus not
connected with the outside world in the
simple and direct fashion supposed by
Plato.
 The poet first derives an inspiration from
the world by the power of his imagination;
the art of poetry then imitates this
imaginative inspiration in language.
 The art of poetry or literature as a whole
exists to give shape and substance to a
certain kind of imaginative impulse; the
existence of the art suggests the existence
of the impulse. Now it is just possible to
imagine life exactly as it is.
 This was Aristotle’s reply to Plato.
 The poet is concerned with truth—but
not the truth of the annalist, the historian,
or the photographer. The poet’s business
is not to write of events that have
happened, but of what may happen, of
things that are possible in the light of
probability or necessity. For this reason
poetry is a more philosophical, a more
serious thing than history
 Walter Pater, a critic of the later nineteenth
century, who discussed the relation of
literature and life in detail, remarked in his
essay on “Style”.
 Thus, according to Pater, the literary artist
does not give us a photographic ‘imitation’
of reality, but a copy of his vision of it. It is
from reality or life from which the artist
starts, but he tries to reconstruct it when he
would ‘see it steadily and see it whole’.
 Taking into consideration the views of
Plato, Aristotle and Pater, we conclude
that the notion that literature is not
concerned with real life is wrong.
 He concentrates on those characteristics
and aspects of life which are permanent,
but which might easily pass unobserved.
 The images which we are creating by our
own observation of life at every moment
of our working experience are hazy, half-
finished and unrelated. It is the literary
artist who finishes them, makes them
clear and puts them in their wider
setting, and to that extent makes life less
obscure, because he knows more about
life than anyone can know without
regarding life with his eyes.