What Is Literature

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What is Literature? When people talk about literature, most often they mean fiction. Therefore, I have to clarify what is literature? Literature helps us comprehend spirit of time. From literature we absorb laws of movement and problems of progress; we learn how people lived and live now, cognize their mentality. Thanks to literary works we can understand different sides of people’s life on the Earth, we learn ourselves, and we open the world. During many centuries literature gave to the world more, than the world knows about it today. Literature represents a dynamic system of literary genres shaped during millenniums, motives, plots, images, verse and prosaic forms, graphic means of language and receptions of a composition. The oral text is not considered as literature, it is considered as folklore. Therefore, it is possible to track occurrence of literature at certain population of people because literature arises when people has a writing. However, not each written text can be named with term literature. For example, the private correspondence will not be considered as literature, though it is included often into collections of many books about known people. Literature includes texts which are exclusively the words of human language and have social value. Literature does not include synthetic and syncretic text, or in another words, in which the verbal component cannot be divorced from the musical, visual or any other. Literature has its own attributes. The song or opera itself is not part of literature. If the song is written by the composer on already existing text then this text can be considered as literature. Literary works should have an author. Though there are also anonymous works, but it happens at ancient texts more often. If the author does not want to be named, then he takes a pseudonym. Many known names in literature are only pseudonyms.
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