When there are so many things to study today, why study literature?
Traditionally, at least two answers have been given to this question.
One is that literature is fun. It's delightful. One of the basic purposes of literature has
always been to entertain, and anything that is genuinely entertaining has value. The other answer
is that literature teaches us many things. It not only delights, it instructs. Those two answers are
as old, or older than the Roman poet Horace. Let us first look more closely at the second of
these two answers and see what literature teaches us