Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Introduction: Society through literature



Literature is a vital mean and tool of communication to readers, sentiments, emotions, critiques, ironies, satires as a consequence of events that happen in a society such as ruthless governments, anarchies, superficial values, stratification, etiquette rules, hypocrisy, wars, etc. It also allows us to discover and differentiate the human thinking corresponding to each date as well as to understand the human essence.  Because of this, the purpose of the blog-project is to trace connections and make an analysis between the relationship regarding social context and content within four literary works: Oscar Wilde with The Picture of Dorian Gray, Samuel Beckett with Waiting for Godot, George Orwell with Animal Farm and Walt Whitman with Song of Myself. Each one of them was written in distinct periods of time during the ninetieth century and discusses mayor themes, for example false impressions, reflection, freedom, abuse of language and existentialism.

Likewise, one of the crucial objectives of this project is to reflect and make us conscious about our present in or`er to see that, expanding the ways of thinking and cultivating practices such as reflection, help broadening, and human understanding, can allow us to gain a diversified perception during those different periods. However, as we study this literary works we notice that society is always repressed by political tyranny, trendy ideas or to follow a common writing style.

“For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?” (Kundera,M). 


Overall, this quote sums up all the ideas said before because there’s no literature without a historic context or daily events. The human existence is questioned since the human started to write and it is amazing how it has evolved according to what surround him. Undoubtedly, the works from the four authors had an enormous influence on the society’s accepted beliefs but what’s significant is not to lose your morals and principles after all.