Introduction to Literary Study

Hello fellas..

What a gloomy day, hope the torrent of rain will bring many blesses for us today and after.

Now I'm going to share about a subject of English Literature that I've been learning in this semester, the title is Introduction to Literary Study. Let's enjoy reading and learning together ^_^

Literature is one of the great creative and universal means of communicating the emotional, spiritual, or intellectual concerns of mankind. Like fine music and art, fine literature is characterized by imagination, meaningfulness of expression, and good form and technique. Literature may instruct and infor, entertain, express personal joy or pain, refelect religious, point of view-whether it be political, social, or aesthetic.

The broadest literary form are prose and verse, and within these basic classifications there exist innumerable varieties in regard to style and form as well as purpose: novels, plays, short stories, essays, biographies, lyric poetry, narrative poetry, and epics. Most literature in modern times is written and printed, but there is also a long history of oral literature. Oral literature may be traced back to earliest times to ancient Greece and to medieval Europa. In fact, some of the great literary masterpieces such as Homer's Illiad and Odyssey, probably were composed orally. The oral traditional is still alive today in folk literature, in which stories and poems are handed down by word of mouth from generation to generation.

After explained what literature is, now the topic is short story. Short-story is a short piece of fiction aiming at unity of characterization, theme, and effect. Short story tries to give us a specified impression of the world we live in. Its plot is not very complex because it is different with novel. The plot creates an unified impression and gives us a vivid sensation. 

Then, a short explanation of legend. Legend is a historical narrative and a symbolic representation of folk belief. In other words, a legend is a narrative of human actions that are perceived by both teller and listeners to take place within human history and to possess certain qualities that give the tale verisimilitude. A majority of legends operate within the realm of an uncertainty, never being entirely believed by the participants.

It's time to know what drama is. Drama is a form of literature intended for performance by players or actors on the stage. In Euroean drama the phases of this situation are generally depicted in a sequence of scenes arranged so that each is the consequence of the preceding, until the conflicting elements reach a point of climax, after which the conflict is resolved and the play ends. Then, the differences between drama and ritual is fundamental. Ritual is essentially practical in purpose. It is a ceremony designed to enlist to support of the higher powers, to avert their wrath, or to facilitate the passage of individuals through the successive stages of life, maturity, and death. For Aristotle the purpose of drama was to give pleasure. For Horace, it was to delight and to instruct. For Moliere, the end of comedy was to make good people laugh.

Last but not least is poetry. Poetry is the term for many literary forms through which man has given rhythmic expression to his most imaginative and intense perceptions of himself and his universe. The other said that poetry is a form of literary art which uses the aesthetic qualities of language to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, the prosaic ostensible meaning. From the Greek poison, meaning "to make", poetry names writing that gives concentrated imaginative utterance to experience, in words so chosen and arrenged that they can create an intense emotional response, through the union of theme, language, sound, and rhythm. Poetry is older than history - the earliest expression of primitive peoples, from tribal ceremonies, long before the written word. Poetry was first associated with music and the dance and early people used poetry to chronicle grea events in their history. It is both the most elemental form of human communication and the most sophisticated and subtle. Poetry attempts to express incommunicable aspects of experience through analogy and metaphor. Every metaphor is a little device for communcating a perception, and longer poems become rhythmical arrangements of metaphors in conscious designs. Poetry differs from prose in several significant respects. Both may employ the same subject matter and attempt to evoke the same emotions, but poetry usually is more intense, less direct, more suggestive and ambiguous. Both poetry and prose have rhythm, but the rhythm in poetry is more marked and regular. The language of poetry is essentially imagery, and most good poem are, on one level, structures of images.

William Wordsworth called poetry "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling recollected in tranquillity." Edgar Allan Poe defined it as "the rhythmical creation of beauty." Edwin Arlington Robinson got at a part of its essence in saying that "poetry is language that tells us, through a more or less emotional reaction, something that cannot be said."