How Can Literature Save a Nation Essay

To fully visualise this question, we need to define first two things. One is, of course, what literature is second, what it is that endangers a domain that can be negated by literature. Literature, per definition, is the art of written works. In Latin, it literally means to be acquainted with letters. So, in that context, every restrain, every journal, every thing written, loosely defined, is literature. Now, what can books, journals and papers perchance do to save a res publica from, say, war? Or stinting crisis?Or anything that can harm what we define as community overlap a common language, a common culture simply, a nation? Take for example something written by a middle-aged American way back in the 1850s. And she was a woman, nonetheless, by the name of Harriett Beecher-Stowe. It revolves nigh an African-American man who, today, would be a houseboy or a worker. Those times, he was called a negro slave. The book is, of course, Uncle Toms Cabin, with the story mite sensiti ve topics of slavery, racism, and religious faith.This unanalyzable book by a simple schoolteacher awakened the minds of the American people into realizing that, to quote Shakespe ares merchandiser of Venice, If you prick me, do I not bleed? If you tickle me, do I not laugh? This aroused a sense of abhorrence that what White Americans were doing to another actual human being, albeit of a different color, to that degree still another living person, what they themselves would not want to be establish up with. In short, this book helped shape Americas forthcoming as a slave-free country by igniting the first sparks of the American civilian War.Coincidentally, some decades later, it was to be the same book that would ignite another rotatory spark somewhere in the Pacific in the Southeast Asiatic region to be exact. While in Madrid, our very own Dr. Jose P. Rizal was travel by Uncle Toms Cabin that he proposed writing a novel that would do the same for the Philippines (at that time under Spanish oppression) what that book did for America. The result was Noli Me Tangere (Touch Me Not). Now, to illustrate how those works saved a nation concretely would be illogical.For it is not paper and pencil that saves a nation, it is us, its people. We are the nations sense of right and wrong and we act on our own consciences. Literature, whether it be the Bible, or Uncle Toms Cabin, or The Da Vinci Code, ignites in us thoughts and emotions.. Of course it cannot save us physically, but it is a catalyst. Literature is concentrated on saving the down human race. It keeps us who we are, points out what makes us different from animals our thinking and our baron to not only change and adapt, but to change the situation we are in.It informs us, thus, giving us new points of view and a broader opinion on a subject leading to a better understanding of it. It generates ideas that bm us into action, that influence us, that change us. This is what creates a force or a chain r eaction of sudden awareness that causes the people of a nation to rise up and save that nation either from slavery, from oppression, from economic downfall, or form anything a nation is to be saved from by its people.