1. Literature

2. What is literature?
P.T. Barnum: Literature is one of the most interesting and significant expressions of humanity.
Boris Pasternak: Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.
Chinua Achebe: I tell my students, it's not difficult to identify with somebody like yourself, somebody next door who looks like you. What's more difficult is to identify with someone you don't see, who's very far away, who's a different color, who eats a different kind of food. When you begin to do that then literature is really performing its wonders.

3. Which book could qualify as literature?
A piece of literature differs from a specialised treatises on astronomy, political economy, philosophy, or even history, in part because it appeals, not to a particular class of readers only, but to men and women; and in part because, while the object of the treatise is simply to impart knowledge, one ideal end of the piece of literature, whether it also imparts knowledge or not, is to yield aesthetic satisfaction by the manner of which it handles its theme..
Literature is a vital record of what men have seen in life; what they have experienced of it, what they have thought and felt about those aspects of it which have the most immediate and enduring interest for all of us...

4. Which book could qualify as literature?
All fiction is a kind of magic and trickery, a confidence trick, trying to make people believe something is true that isn't. And the novelist, in a particular, is trying to convince the reader that he is seeing society as a whole…
. . . it is not only a question of the artist looking into himself but also the of his looking into others with the experience he has of himself. He writes with sympathy because he feels that the other man is like him.

5. Which book could qualify as literature?
From things that had happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. - Ernest Hemingway

6. Which book could qualify as literature?
The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed, so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling 'Kilroy was here' on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass…

7. Effect of time and space on literature
Discuss based on your readings
For instance, let us look at this video…
Considering that language has undergone immense change, would the language used in literary works be the same?
Would Indians ever be writing in English if we weren’t colonized?
So, does history have an effect on literature?

8. Genres of literature

9. References

10. Book Club (10 books, minimum one from each)
Bucket 1
Dramas, Plays, Poetry, Subject-based Essays (non-fiction), Self-help
Bucket 2
Fantasy: sci-fi, magical realism, mythology,
Bucket 3
Mystery, Adventure, Thriller, Action, Graphic Novels, Detective
Bucket 4
Classics, (Auto)Biographies, World Literature, Anthologies, Short stories, Folk Tales, Modern Classics
Bucket 5
Realistic Fiction, Asian fiction, Teen fiction, Historical fiction
Bucket 6
Award-winning books - children / adult awards