Growing Up With Literature

This is our final year for our degree course. As we come closer to the end of my university life, I feel some sort of reluntance. A relunctance to leave the course, a reluntance to leave my coursemates and lecturers, and a reluntance to leave UPM.

During the past two years, I have learnt many literary texts and been exposed to much great works. Reading literature is like an adventure for me. In an adventure, we explore and explore until we discover something new. The same goes to literature, as we explore the texts and make the meaning out of it, we discover new ideas. We discover different things even when we read the same literary text at two different times.

By rereading, I believe the literary work is still of great interests to us. For example, before exposure to any literature, when I read the short story “Paul’s Case” by Willa Carter for the first time, I realise the importance of life, everyone of us should appreciate life and should not take it for granted. However, after much exposure to literature, when I read the same story the second time, I feel that as we can’t take life for granted, we should live a more meaningful life. A person who lives in solitude will not be as happy as a person who lives among friends. In the story, Paul does not have any friends, he lives in his own world, he has no one to confide his problems. When he can’t cope with it, he commits suicide. Thus, the lesson has become clearer that everyone of us need friends. No one can live without friends. It goes true when the proverb says ‘No man is an island’.

In exploring literature, I feel that I am growing from a baby to a mature adult. Before exposure to literature, I was like a baby who drinks milk, I can only take liquid food in that I know very little and the surface meaning of literature. As I grow up, I have to go beyond the ‘milk’ stage, I start to partake solid food. It requires me to chew (thought and research) and digest (application). I do not read literature just for knowing enough to ‘get along’ but for its deeper meaning. I study and analyse it so that I can better able to apply its lessons in dealing with our problems and in helping others to deal with theirs.

Here I like to quote what Barnet and Cain (2003) says about literature, “Literature wakes us up, makes us see, helps us feel intensely some aspects of our experience and perhaps evaluate it.” Yes, let us press on to maturity by exploring literature now!