Why literature is important

Why is literature important?

Here are some answers:

“The things that literature can investigate and teach are few but invaluable: the way to look at others and at oneself, to relate personal matters with general matters, to give meaning to small and big things, to consider one’s own limitations as well as those of others, to find proportions in life, and the place of love in it, and its power and its rhythm, and the place of death and the way to think about it or not; literature can teach us toughness, compassion, sorrow, irony, humour, and many others of these necessary and difficult notions. The rest you must seek elsewhere, in science, in history, in life, just as we all must always go and learn it” (Italo Calvino, “Il midollo del leone” [The lion’s marrow] (1955), in Saggi, I, Milan, Mondadori, 1995, pp. 21-22).

“fiction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spunt in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in” (Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own / Una stanza tutta per sé, Torino: Einaudi Tascabili – Serie bilingue, 1995, p. 84 [beginning of ch. 3])

“Literature as a whole is […] the range of articulate human imagination as it extends from the height of imaginative heaven to the depth of imaginative hell. Literature is a human apocalypse, man’s revelation to man” (Northrop Frye, “The Keys to Dreamland”, in The Educated Imagination, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964, p. 105).