As a graduating senior (woo-hoo!), I had to fill out an online survey for the Department of English. I tend to forget things, so I did it now to get it out of the way. One of the questions was “Describe what you see as the social significance of literature.” I answered:
Literature teaches us what it means to be human. We can’t live every part of the human experience. We can’t all know individually what it’s like to fall passionately in love, to exact revenge, to be shipwrecked, to travel abroad, and to be the opposite sex. We have literature so that we can try to understand how other people live or might live.
And that’s just the short answer.
