22.1 Why Study Literature in a Composition Class?

You may wonder why you are reading a work of literature in your composition class. This is a good question to ask. It might seem that a novel or a play doesn’t belong in a course that otherwise focuses on reading and writing academic nonfiction. What does literature have to do with the other business of this course—with rhetoric, research, analysis, or the many other writing topics you have studied in this textbook?

The answer is quite a bit, actually. Reading and responding to literary texts can help you to further develop the critical thinking and writing abilities that you have already begun to practice in your other assignments. This is because literary texts, just like academic essays, are well-crafted pieces of language that engage with the pressing questions and issues of our time. Reading them carefully (and researching them, and writing about them) gives you the opportunity to become a better reader and writer of all kinds of texts. Consider:

When you read literature, you see another writer using language to achieve a purpose.The authors of the literary texts you will read in this course are highly-skilled users of language. With words alone, they create powerful experiences for their readers. Reading their works, you may have a deep emotional reaction, encounter an unfamiliar point of view, gain a fresh understanding of an historical event or current circumstance, or become invested in people, situations, and ideas that you had never fully considered. That is to say, while these authors may be writing fiction, their aims are much the same as yours when you write essays for this course.

So, too, are the writing tools that they use. As you read the novel or the play that you’ve been assigned, pay close attention to how the authors use the tools you have been mastering—rhetoric, structure, and style, among others—to compose effective pieces of writing. It goes without saying that there are tremendous differences between Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut’s novel about the Second World War, and a researched essay on the same topic. And yet, both texts carefully organize information to guide our reading experience; both use style to engage and move us; and both use rhetorical devices to communicate a compelling perspective of that historical conflict.

When you write about literature, you have another opportunity to practice your rhetorical skills. This is because literature is great for arguing about. Like any narrative, it invites you to study the evidence, form an interpretation, and then present your interpretation to others, hoping to convince them to see what you see, to interpret the text the way you do.

Continue Reading: 22.2 How to Read a Play