literature

Literature 

Definition: 
Literature is a term used to describe written or spoken material. Broadly speaking, "literature" is used to describe anything from creative writing to more technical or scientific works, but the term is most commonly used to refer to works of the creative imagination, including works of poetry, drama, fiction, and nonfiction.

British Literature 

British literature refers to literature associated with the United Kingdom, Isle of Man, Channel Islands, as well as to literature from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, prior to the formation of the UK.By far the largest part of British literature is written in the English language, but there are bodies of written works in Latin, Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Scots, Cornish, Manx, Jèrriais, Guernésiais and other languages. Northern Ireland has a literary tradition in English, Ulster Scots and Irish. Irish writers have also played an important part in the development of English-language literature.
TYPES OF LITERATURE
1: POETRY
2:HISTORY
3:BIOGRAPHY
4:LETTERS
5:PHILOSOPHY
6:ORATORY
7:APOCALYPSE
                                               POETRY

Poetry

Poetry (ancient Greek: ποιεω (poieo) = I create) is an art form in which human language is used for its aesthetic qualities in addition to, or instead of, its notional and semantic content. It consists largely of oral or literary works in which language is used in a manner that is felt by its user and audience to differ from ordinary prose.
It may use condensed or compressed form to convey emotion or ideas to the reader's or listener's mind or ear; it may also use devices such as assonance and repetition to achieve musical or incantatory effects. Poems frequently rely for their effect on imagery, word association, and the musical qualities of the language used. The interactive layering of all these effects to generate meaning is what marks poetry.
Because of its nature of emphasising linguistic form rather than using language purely for its content, poetry is notoriously difficult to translate from one language into another: a possible exception to this might be the Hebrew Psalms, where the beauty is found more in the balance of ideas than in specific vocabulary. In most poetry, it is the connotations and the "baggage" that words carry (the weight of words) that are most important. These shades and nuances of meaning can be difficult to interpret and can cause different readers to "hear" a particular piece of poetry differently. While there are reasonable interpretations, there can never be a definitive interpretation.
Bibliography. These are generic "histories of literature":

  • Cambridge: Concise History of English Literature
  • Penguin: History of English Literature
  • Oxford: Concise Companion to English Literature
  • Oxford: Companion to American Literature
  • Avenel: Companion to English and American Literature
  • Oxford: Companion to American Literature
  • Marcus Cunliffe: American Literature
Excellent books for the 20th century:
  • Harry Blamires: A Guide to Twentieth Century Literature in English (1983)
  • Frederick Karl: American Fictions 1940-80 (1983)
  • Harvard: Guide

    What is Philosophy?


The Nature of Philosophy
The word philosophy literally means love of wisdom;1 this tells us something about the nature of philosophy, but not much, because many disciplines seek wisdom. How does philosophy differ from these other disciplines? A brief look at the historical development of the field will help us to answer this question. On the standard way of telling the story, humanity's first systematic inquiries took place within a mythological or religious framework: wisdom ultimately was to be derived from sacred traditions and from individuals thought to possess privileged access to a supernatural realm, whose own access to wisdom, in turn, generally was not questioned. However, starting in the sixth century BCE, there appeared in ancient Greece a series of thinkers whose inquiries were comparatively secular (see "The Milesians and the Origin of Philosophy").2 Presumably, these thinkers conducted their inquiries through reason and observation, rather than through tradition or revelation. These thinkers were the first philosophers. Although this picture is admittedly simplistic, the basic distinction has stuck: philosophy in its most primeval form is considered nothing less than secular inquiry itself.3
However, there are now many forms of secular inquiry, so what distinguishes philosophy from them? In the beginning, there was perhaps no distinction. But, as civilization advanced, two parts of philosophy became so powerful in their own right that they separated off, claiming for themselves the status of independent disciplines. Mathematics was the first, and split off very early in the game; science (or natural philosophy, as it was called even into the nineteenth century) was the second, splitting off much later. To modern philosophy is left whatever questions these two disciplines cannot solve (at least at a given time), including not only questions that are traditionally thought to be beyond the two (e.g. "What is the meaning of life?"), but also theoretical questions at their fringes (e.g. "Can natural selection operate at the species level?") and conceptual questions at their foundations (e.g. "What is science?"). Philosophy, of course, is best known for the first class of questions, which includes some of the most difficult and important questions there are, such as whether or not there is a god, how one can know anything at all, and how a person ought to live.
Philosophy is characterized as much by its methods as by its subject matter. Although philosophers deal with speculative issues that generally are not subject to investigation through experimental test, and philosophy therefore is more fully conceptual than science, philosophy properly done is not mere speculation. Philosophers, just like scientists, formulate hypotheses which ultimately must answer to reason and evidence.4 This is one of the things that differentiates philosophy from poetry and mysticism, despite its not being a science.

  1. The Main Branches of Philosophy are divided as to the nature of the questions asked in each area. The integrity of these divisions cannot be rigidly maintained, for one area overlaps into the others.
    1. Axiology: the study of value; the investigation of its nature, criteria, and metaphysical status. More often than not, the term "value theory" is used instead of "axiology" in contemporary discussions even though the term “theory of value” is used with respect to the value or price of goods and services in economics.
      1. Some significant questions in axiology include the following:
        1. Nature of value: is value a fulfillment of desire, a pleasure, a preference, a behavioral disposition, or simply a human interest of some kind?
        2. Criteria of value: de gustibus non (est) disputandum (i.e., (“there's no accounting for tastes”) or do objective standards apply?
        3. Status of value: how are values related to (scientific) facts? What ultimate worth, if any, do human values have?
      2. Axiology is usually divided into two main parts.
        1. Ethics: the study of values in human behavior or the study of moral problems: e.g., (1) the rightness and wrongness of actions, (2) the kinds of things which are good or desirable, and (3) whether actions are blameworthy or praiseworthy.
          1. Consider this example analyzed by J. O. Urmson in his well-known essay, "Saints and Heroes":

            "We may imagine a squad of soldiers to be practicing the throwing of live hand grenades; a grenade slips from the hand of one of them and rolls on the ground near the squad; one of them sacrifices his life by throwing himself on the grenade and protecting his comrades with his own body. It is quite unreasonable to suppose that such a man must be impelled by the sort of emotion that he might be impelled by if his best friend were in the squad."
          2. Did the soldier who threw himself on the grenade do the right thing? If he did not cover the grenade, several soldiers might be injured or be killed. His action probably saved lives; certainly an action which saves lives is a morally correct action. One might even be inclined to conclude that saving lives is a duty. But if this were so, wouldn't each of the soldiers have the moral obligation or duty to save his comrades? Would we thereby expect each of the soldiers to vie for the opportunity to cover the grenade?
        2. Æsthetics: the study of value in the arts or the inquiry into feelings, judgments, or standards of beauty and related concepts. Philosophy of art is concerned with judgments of sense, taste, and emotion.
          1. E.g., Is art an intellectual or representational activity? What would the realistic representations in pop art represent? Does art represent sensible objects or ideal objects?
          2. Is artistic value objective? Is it merely coincidental that many forms in architecture and painting seem to illustrate mathematical principles? Are there standards of taste?
          3. Is there a clear distinction between art and reality?
    2. Epistemology: the study of knowledge. In particular, epistemology is the study of the nature, scope, and limits of human knowledge.
      1. Epistemology investigates the origin, structure, methods, and integrity of knowledge.
      2. Consider the degree of truth of the statement, "The earth is round." Does its truth depend upon the context in which the statement is uttered? For example, this statement can be successively more accurately translated as …
        • "The earth is spherical"
        • "The earth is an oblate spheroid" (i.e., flattened at the poles).
        • But what about the Himalayas and the Marianas Trench? Even if we surveyed exactly the shape of the earth, our process of surveying would alter the surface by the footprints left and the impressions of the survey stakes and instruments. Hence, the exact shape of the earth cannot be known. Every rain shower changes the shape.
        • (Note here as well the implications for skepticism and relativism: simply because we cannot exactly describe the exact shape of the earth, the conclusion does not logically follow that the earth does not have a shape.)
      3. Furthermore, consider two well-known problems in epistemology:
        1. Russell's Five-Minute-World Hypothesis: Suppose the earth were created five minutes ago, complete with memory images, history books, records, etc., how could we ever know of it? As Russell wrote in The Analysis of Mind, "There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that "remembered" a wholly unreal past. There is no logically necessary connection between events at different times; therefore nothing that is happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago." For example, an omnipotent God could create the world with all the memories, historical records, and so forth five minutes ago. Any evidence to the contrary would be evidence created by God five minutes ago. (Q.v., the Omphalos hypothesis.)
        2. Suppose everything in the universe (including all spatial relations) were to expand uniformly a thousand times larger. How could we ever know it? A moment's 
        thought reveals that the mass of objects increases by the cube whereas the distance among them increases linearly. Hence, if such an expansion were possible, changes in the measurement of gravity and the speed of light would be evident, if, indeed, 
        1. life would be possible.
        2. Russell's Five-Minute-World Hypothesis is a philosophical problem; the impossibility of the objects in the universe expanding is a scientific problem since the latter problem can, in fact, be answered by principles of elementary physics.
    3. Ontology or Metaphysics: the study of what is really real. Metaphysics deals with the so-called first principles of the natural order and "the ultimate generalizations available to the human intellect." Specifically, ontology seeks to indentify and establish the relationships between the categories, if any, of the types of existent things.
      1. What kinds of things exist? Do only particular things exist or do general things also exist? How is existence possible? Questions as to identity and change of objects—are you the same person you were as a baby? as of yesterday? as of a moment ago?
      2. How do ideas exist if they have no size, shape, or color? (My idea of the Empire State Building is quite as "small" or as "large" as my idea of a book. I.e., an idea is not extended in space.) What is space? What is time?
      3. E.g., Consider the truths of mathematics: in what manner do geometric figures exist? Are points, lines, or planes real or not? Of what are they made?
      4. What is spirit? or soul? or matter? space? Are they made up of the same sort of "stuff"?
      5. When, if ever, are events necessary? Under what conditions are they possible?
       

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