Literature has the power to give us an enriched understanding of other worlds, lives and times,

of the way things have been and how they might be.

Reading, thinking, writing and talking about literature is both a personal and collegiate experience – a model

of how society operates or should operate.

Literature embodies the values of imagination, identification and empathy.

These matter in an increasingly divisive world. 

Characters in literature are very often transformed by the plot and this process models the way

literature intervenes in our own lives and can transform them.

The shared experience of studying literature in class gives us the ability and the need

to read the world and its texts on our own.

Studying literature recognises that the making of meaning is a dynamic and volatile process

and that meanings are socially and culturally produced, as various and multiple as readers. 

Studying literature explores the text in its many contexts, how the text finds and makes a place in the world,

how it is enabled to speak and to make a difference.

Studying literature and critical reading are an opening out that returns us to the text

in an adventure that never finishes.

The study and criticism of literature is not just a social act but an inherently political act.

Authoritarian governments are for that reason suspicious and antagonistic towards advanced literary study.

Take every opportunity to have your lives changed by the reading

and studying of literature. Because it matters. 

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