To study literature is to take texts that have formed fundamental parts of hman thought and unlock them through

the careful use of explorative technique and thematic search. To study literature is totake a whole, a wonderfully crafted sentence, paragraph, poem, fragment it into a million little pieces and study each of those pieces with carre and affection, applying the skills of literary and linguistic exploration and then repiece the fragments into the coherent whole once again, with an understadning of how the best works. Poetry, literature, fine writing is a million pieces of technnique, different wavelenghts and frequencies that come together to fom a bomb, someting that can impact the human psyche all the way to shaping fundamental elements of humanity. The bible is of course a prime example. What else has impacted such rudimentary human lighthouses so profoundly, relgion, apart from the bible? What other text has found its way in so many masterpieces of literary genius? Milton's epic, Paradise Lost, is what I would call a prime example of this influence. To study literature is to engage with human thought in its purest form. Through studying the text, you study individual voice: not only the functionings of the piece of literature but also the voice of the mind that created it. Roland Barthes set out to contradict this in his essay The death of the author, but how else can literature function if the creative mind's influx of bombing genius does not resonate through the text? Authors, texts, poetry, phrases and every other fragment that constitutes not only canonical writing but also side, contemporary writings are all not only products of the time they were created in but are also constituted by fragments of the author's experience. After all, texts are profoundly human creations. Nothing escapes the time it was written in, no matter how hard the author tries to craft a piece otherwise, to quote Margaret Atwood's In search of alias grace. Literary texts then also serve as a more human approach to documentation and historicizing. While studying a self proclaimed 'histioriographic metafiction', Alias Grace, I have encountered mindboggling questions about the very nature of history: what is, history? Would history have been different had slaves written it? Perhaps literary texts are a parallel to history, as well as very important parts of the fabric that forms it. This is because subjectivity is such a central part of literature: how we interpret literary texts lies at the very CORE , the very NUCLEUS of literature and its study.Postmodernism of course seems to thrive on this ideal. The fact that the reader creates the text, and that the author dies is at the centre of the postmodern condition. It has been named as a condition by------ see book. What else is literature? People I have talked to strive to label literature as something more than it is. Literature is fundamentally aesthetic, and I side with Harold Bloom on this. People read for pleasure. All other effects of liteature, such as echoing a subjective history of the transcontemporary time, are secondary, albeit massively

important. Shakespeare wrote to amuse, to please, to satisfy not only the common theatre goers and King James but also himself. He poured out his knowledge of the human condition and the human psyche, he poured out his subconscious in his plays. Sylvia Plath's condemnation and haunting voice, the masterful thrust of her voice, in Daddy is one of the most significant examples of this that I can recall at present moment. Tennysons elegiac In Memoriam is one of the most substantial expressions of mourning that I have encountered. I LOVE LTIERATURE.