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The Importance Of Literature

Decent Essays
Since the Mid 20th century literature has been a prominent aspect of life in American culture, beginning how to read it in childhood to benefiting by it throughout adulthood. Throughout the texts “Heels over Hemingway”, “Why Literature Matters” , and “Good-bad books” all argue the idea that literature has changed over the years, due to the fact that the world around us has changed as well which effects literature. For this reason Dowd, Orwell, and Gioia assert to their audience the importance of literature, and that it should have a place in society by utilizing rhetorical strategies such as analogies, ethos, pathos, logos, and diction. Both Dowd and Gioia argue why literature is important by citing the negative effects. One of…show more content…
Dowd begins her op-editorial full of emotionally loaded diction to create a very critically- aggressive image; Dowd notes when looking for a book in the bookstore and quickly noticing the increased amount of chick-lit as it had “staged a coup of the literature shelves” and that a new re-feminized cover of a best seller “might as well be driving a stake through the heart of the classics.” The literary images she evokes of the recurring chick-lit novels read by women seen as literary hell due to the “non-challenging material”, implies to the audience the idea of women being judged by society due to book preference. Adding to this idea she utilizes words and phrase such as “possessed”, “devil” , “Will Shakespeare is being buffeted by rampaging 30- year- old heroines.” All these words elicit negative emotions of women, which emphasizes how women are judged as superficial and non-intellectual by society in the same way books are. In addition both Orwell and Gioia use pathos to convey the idea that reading any type of literature is beneficial to society. Orwell begins by slightly degrading the non-stop production of “good-bad books” in this generation to the sophisticated novels produced in the past. He implies that these “escapist” literature forms “pleasant patches in one's memory” by creating “quiet corners where the mind can browse at odd moments.” The image Orwell is able to evoke among
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