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How stories have shaped the world
The importance of poetry
Chinese literature is based on the Book of Songs, a collection of simple poems that have accrued much interpretation and commentary.
The Book of Songs enshrined poetry as the most important form of literature across East Asia.
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Ancient stories that shaped history
Alexander the Great learned to read and write by studying Homer's Iliad. Thanks to his teacher, the philosopher Aristotle, he had done so with unusual intensity. When Alexander embarked on his conquests, a copy of the Iliad accompanied him.
Homer's Iliad helped to shape an entire society and its ethics. The story revealed the kind of effect moral choices could have on the general public.
Stories shape language
As more and more parts of the world became literate, new technologies such as paper and print increased the reach and influence of written stories. More readers meant new stories started to appear.
When Dante Alighieri wrote his Comedy in the spoken dialect of Tuscany, it helped to turn the dialect into a legitimate language we now call Italian.
Mass production and literacy
The era of mass production and mass literacy we have today is the result of the invention of print in northern Europe by Johannes Gutenburg.
Novels didn't have the baggage associated with ancient forms of literature. They allowed new types of authors and readers, especially women who used novels to engage with the most pressing questions of modern society.
Novels shape ideas
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is at the forefront of what would come to be known as science fiction, revealing the promise of science and its destructive potential.
Similarly, novels were used by emerging countries to assert their independence. Political independence needed cultural independence, and novels proved the best way of gaining it.
Censored literature
The printing press also made it easier to control and censor literature. It became a problem for authors living in regimes such as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.
Today, we are living through another revolution in writing technologies. The internet is changing how we read and write, how literature spreads, and who has access to it.
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Insight from literature
Over the history of Western literature about pandemics, much has been said in the way of catharsis, ways of dealing with intense emotion, and political commentary on how people respond to public he...
Stories help us to think
Homer's Iliad opens with a plague visited upon the Greek camp at Troy. The Decameron (1353) by Giovanni Boccaccio is set during the Black Death.
The stories offer the listeners ways to consider how similar crises have been managed previously, and how to reorganize their daily lives, which have been suspended due to the epidemic.
Authority's failure to respond
- Mary Shelley's apocalypse novel The Last Man (1826), depicts the life of Lionel Verney, who becomes the last man after a devastating global plague. The book criticizes the institutional responses to the plague, showing the revolutionary utopianism and the in-fighting that breaks out among surviving groups before they also die.
- The short story, The Masque of the Red Death (1842), also shows the failures o authority figures to respond to a disaster appropriately.
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Our ideas of love
The differences in how people have loved throughout history suggest that our style of loving is to a significant extent determined by what the prevailing environment dictates.
It is through ...
What is lacking in art
... are crucial elements of wisdom, realism and maturity. Our love stories excite us to expect things of love that are neither very possible nor very practical.
We learn to judge ourselves by the hopes and expectations fostered by a misleading artistic medium.
How love stories affect us
Emma Bovary in Madame Bovary (1856) spent her childhood immersed in Romantic fiction. As a result, she’s expecting that her husband will be someone who understands her soul perfectly.
When she does get married to the kind, thoughtful but human. But she is quickly bored by the routines of married life. She is convinced that her life has gone profoundly wrong for one central reason: because it’s so different from what the novels she knows told her it would be.
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Silent Reading Vs Reading It Aloud
- The ancient art of reading out aloud has many benefits like better recall, a better understanding of complex content, and even strengthening of emotional bonds.
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The Many Effects Of Reading Out Aloud
- The Production Effect: Researchers have found that people remember words and texts better if those are read out aloud, as compared to silent reading.
- The Generation Effect: Words said aloud while giving a response to a question stand out, and are distinctive.
- The Enactment Effect: Spoken words also let us visualize, imagine and even enact certain words, strongly associating them with our memory.
Pausing Memory Decline By Reading Aloud
Reading aloud is great for elderly people and can delay the onset of dementia and also make certain memory problems detectable at an early stage.
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