The Value of Literature: Life Lessons that teach values & cause/effect

Why study literature?  Why should I care what someone (dead, most likely) has written?  How--or why--does it concern me--or anyone else?  (And why do I put samples on this site?)

Excellent questions.  Here's your answers--or some of them (for now):

* Dynamics of literature show our best and worst as testimonies of society over the legacy and history of Mankind (as we know it).

* Enables us to recognize achievement of human dreams and struggles from places and times apart from our own.

* Offers valuable testimonies about life experiences that broaden our knowledge.

* Links us with varied base of culture, philosophy, and religious values that comprise our beliefs and ideals.

* Provide resource tools of perspective by using our imagination in ways that a computer or television set can NOT do but our brain is capable:  literature sensitizes us with interest, concern, tension, excitement, hope, fear, regret, humor, and sympathy.

* Literature helps shape our judgments through comparison and perception of good and evil (cause-and effect); options, decisions, outcomes.

* Literature teaches us about human nature:  Perceptions, feelings, lives, patterns of human existence that are timeless and consistent; motivations that have shaped and altered society for better or worse.

Therefore, literature makes us THINK and stretch our ability to do so!  

(That's called "extrapolation" and "juxtaposition" in vocabulary terms; go look them up and see what they mean.)