Is Literature Becoming Obsolete?

I am a teacher by profession and passion, and I 'teach' English Literature for the undergraduates, a subject which is popularly called 'Optional English'. It appears quite ironic because the less learned never associate the term literature with what they study in this paper! My love for literature did not come that easily, thanks to my teachers for they played a major role in instilling in me the worth of literature. When I began my literature voyage, I found madness everywhere, but what kept me going was the fact that there was a method to this madness.

The long hours of reading Caedmon to Shakespeare to Wordsworth to Byron, took me on a vigorous ride. I bore the rood on my back as I compared my beloved to the summer's day and recollected my thoughts in tranquility only to realise that I loved not man less but nature more. Some other friends like Keats, Frost and Arnold amused me in a manner very different; they made the ordinary seem extraordinary. Just the sight of the beaded bubbles winking at the brim got me intoxicated, and I flung outward conquering every birch while still musing on the reality that there was before me a land of dreams, so various, so beautiful, so new.

While I was getting drunk in poetry, I accidentally bumped into the novels, and then I went on to take many a strolls with Austen, Bronte, Hardy and Lawrence. They took me to faraway places, to lands I had never been. They made me feel the wind that touched their noses, made me feel the chill of their winters while Bangalore was hitting a 30 degree Celsius in its summer days. I loved Darcy as much as Lizzy did; I mourned for Helen Burns while Jane Eyre wept; I smelled the mud of Egdon Heath along with Eustacia; and I saw the rainbow of hope holding hands with Urusula.

The Muses who blessed Homer and Milton have now become weak. I search for a voice, a philosophy that would say "of all creatures that breathe and move upon the earth, nothing is bred that is weaker than man". Or even a powerful tone which could utter that "the mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven", and put some sense into mankind. Yeats and Eliot saw the horrific future in things falling apart through a heap of broken images, but now they have become mere words in history that silently pass under our critical eyes of postmodernism and postcolonialism.

The multifarious schools of thoughts have taken over the field. Barthes' understanding of the world of words and meanings, through signifier, signified and sign, made me dissect literature. While I made my pen a surgical knife, I had a Derrida enter the room and say that I now enacted before an informed audience, and that I should have to deconstruct all that I have learned. Grappling with many ideologies and contradictions, my struggle of learning and unlearning was justified when Descartes shouldered me with his philosophy, "I think therefore I am."

Literature became laborious, but interestingly laborious. It tickled my mind. I saw literature now becoming cultural studies, but the writers of the past disengaged themselves with the new readers. Aesthetic reading was slowly being replaced by critical reading. The search for truth became rampant until another friend came along and enlightened me. This friend was know for his name which most found difficult to spell or even pronounce. The many dates I had with Nietzsche made me realise that there is no truth but there are only interpretations.

Let me now tell you a secret. Literature is not just aesthetic pleasure or understanding the world in its pixelated frames. It is beyond that, where amidst all the noble pursuits that exists, literature comes forth as the mother of all. She sustains life and gives it a meaning. She allows us to understand and express our emotions. She is the only reason why a part of the human race is still sane. How can literature ever become obsolete, for she is a daily prayer and the breath of all mankind!