Janet Cozzo
English 214
micro-essay #1

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To determine what the term "literature" means in my eyes is fairly impossible to accomplish. Literature is so many different things to each individual that there would end up being millions of definitions. Therefore, each person is responsible for determing what exactly they think literature means to them. Authors, critics, formalists, students, professors, everyone has their own defintion. To me, literature is the end result when a person changes a part of life. When you take regular words or ideas and construct them to what you want them to mean. The outcome of the contsruction may be one thing for you, but something completely different for a different reader. How you read literature, also, is an interesting topic to think about. I may read a piece of literature and my roommate may read the same one but the two of us could have completely different ideas about what the author wanted us to get from it. To decipher what is or is not literature, is something as undefinable as trying to explain what literature is. It must be up to the individual, I suppose. Not one person can be the one to tell us what is literature and what is not. The entire topic of literature is a slightly "touchy" one because whatever opinion I have, or anyone else, could be looked at as wrong. All I know is that everyone can enjoy literature because of the freedom it possesses, and freedom it makes you feel.