Popular

Literature
 I. NATURE
• Literature can be defined as an expression of
human feelings, thoughts, and ideas whose
medium is language, oral and written
• It is not only about human ideas, thoughts, and
feelings but also about experiences of the authors
• It can be medium for human to communicate what
they feel, think, experience to the readers
 ‘LITERATURE’ BASED ON DIFFERENT
POINT OF VIEWS
• Literature is art
• Literature is language
• Literature is aesthetic
• Literature is fictional
• Literature is expressive
• Literature is affective
• Literature is everything in print
• It means any writing can be categorized as literature
 LITERATURE AS ART FORM
1. IMAGINATIVE LITERATURE
• highly ‘connotative’ - words that used in literary works have feeling and shades of
meaning that words tend to evoke
• Imaginative literature or “literature of power” - it interprets human experience by
presenting actual truths about particular events

2. NON-IMAGINATIVE LITERATURE
• words refer to meaning in dictionary
• Non-Fictional Literature or “literature of knowledge” - which presents actual
facts, events, experiences and ideas
 TWO CATEGORIES OF
LITERATURE ACCORDING TO
KLEDEN
Kleden (2004) - states that literature can be differentiate based on the kind of
meanings that exist in a text

A. LITERARY TEXT - consists of textual meaning and referential meaning

B. NON-LITERARY TEXT - only consists of referral meaning

• TEXTUAL MEANING is the meaning that is produced by the relationship of

text itself
• REFERENTIAL MEANING it is produced by the relationship between internal
text and external text (world beyond the text)
 II. APPEAL
• Something that makes the viewers or readers
attracted and interested in the literary piece
 III. SOCIAL FUNCTION
(FUNCTIONS OF LITERATURE)
• ENTERTAINMENT FUNCTION - Known as, “pleasure reading”. Used to entertain
its readers. It is consumed for the sake of one’s enjoyment
• SOCIAL AND POLITICAL FUNCTION - shows how society works around them. It
helps the reader “see” the social and political constructs around him and shows
the state of the people and the world around him
• IDEOLOGICAL FUNCTION - shapes our way of thinking based on the ideas of
other people. Displays a person’s ideology placed in the text consciously and
unconsciously
• MORAL FUNCTION - may impart moral values to its readers. The morals
contained in a literary text, whether good or bad are absorbed by whoever reads
it, thus helps in shaping their personality
 III. SOCIAL FUNCTION
(FUNCTIONS OF LITERATURE)
• LINGUISTIC FUNCTION - preserves the language of every civilization from where it originated.
evidences that a certain civilization has existed by recording the language and preserving it
through wide spans of time
• CULTURAL FUNCTION - orients us to the traditions, folklore and the arts of our ethnic group’s
heritage. It preserves entire cultures and creates an imprint of the people’s way of living for
others to read, hear and learn
• EDUCATIONAL FUNCTION - teaches us of many things about the human experience. Used to
portray the facets of life that we see, and those that we would never dream of seeing. Literature,
therefore, is a conduct for the chance to experience and feel things where we can learn things
about life
• HISTORICAL FUNCTION - Ancient texts, illuminated scripts, stone tablets etc. keeps a record of
events that happened in the place where they originated. Thus, they serve as time capsules of
letters that are studies by scholars and researchers of today
 IMPORTANCE OF LITERATURE
• It entertains you and provides useful occupation in your free time
• It makes you a wiser and more experienced person by forcing you to judge,
sympathize with, or criticize the characters you read about
• Literature improves your command of language
• It teaches you about the life, cultures and experiences of people in other parts of
the world
• It gives you information about other parts of the world which you may never be
able to visit in your lifetime
• It helps you compare your own experiences with the experiences of other people
• It gives information which may be useful in other subjects, for example, in
Geography, Science, History, Social Studies and so on
 UNIVERSAL CHARACTERISTICS
OF LITERATURE
1. Timelessness
2. Eternity
3. Universality
4. Permanence
Popular Literature
 POPULAR LITERATURE
GENRES:
• Romance
• Science Fiction
• Detective Story
• Comic Books/ Strip
ROMANCE
 ROMANCE
• In the strictest academic terms, a romance is a narrative genre in
literature that involves a mysterious, adventurous, or spiritual story line
where the focus is on a quest that involves bravery and strong values,
not always a love interest. However, modern definitions of romance
also include stories that have a relationship issue as the main focus

• In the academic sense, an example of a romance is a story in which the

main character is a hero who must conquer various challenges as part
of a quest. Each challenge could be its own story and can be taken out
of the overall story without harming the plot.
TYPES OF
ROMANCE
 GOTHIC
• In Gothic romance, the settings are usually in distant regions and the
stories feature dark and compelling characters. They became popular in
the late 19th century and usually had a sense of transcendence,
supernatural, and irrationality. Popular Gothic novels still read by many
high school students today are classics such as:

• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

• Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
 HISTORICAL
• Historical romance takes place in times long past and appears
romantic due to the adventure and wildness of the time. This also
provides value and meaning to the lifestyle of the characters. The
following novels fit in this sub-genre:

• The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper

• Rob Roy by Sir Walter Scott
 CONTEMPORARY/MODERN
• Contemporary romance focuses on a love relationship and has a happy ending. There
are two ways these romance novels are written: as a series or category romance (the
author writes a succession of books that fit a theme or follow a storyline) or as a single-
title romance. Even more so, within the sub-genre romance, and as seen in many
movies, there can be:

• comedy-romance
• tragic-romance
• satire-romance
• serious romance

• Playwrights and poets also treat romance with various tones.

 THE IMPORTANCE OF ROMANCE
• Romance is a natural human emotion. However, there is some criticism
that many modern romantic stories make people develop unrealistic views
about real relationships, as they expect love to be like it is in the movies

• Barbara Cartland was a British writer who wrote 723 romance novels
before her death in 2000. While her novels were mainly historical in
context, Cartland’s simple format for love stories and success opened a
whole new publishing field, specifically with companies such as Harlequin
Romance and Bantam. As a result, more modern writers began filling the
niche and the romance novel evolved on different levels
SCIENCE FICTION
 SCIENCE FICTION
• Science fiction, often called “sci-fi,” whose content is imaginative, but
based in science. It relies heavily on scientific facts, theories, and
principles as support for its settings, characters, themes, and plot-lines,
which is what makes it different from fantasy
• So, while the storylines and elements of science fiction stories are
imaginary, they are usually possible according to science—or at least
plausible
• Its true popularity for both writers and audiences came with the rise of
technology over the past 150 years, with developments such as electricity,
space exploration, medical advances, industrial growth, and so on. As
science and technology progress, so does the genre of science fiction
 TYPES OF
SCIENCE FICTION
 Hard Science Fiction
• Hard science fiction strictly follows scientific facts and principles
• It is strongly focused on natural sciences like physics, astronomy,
chemistry, astrophysics, etc. Interestingly, hard science fiction is often
written by real scientists, and has been known for making both
accurate and inaccurate predictions of future events
• For example, the recent film Gravity, the story of an astronaut whose
spacecraft is damaged while she repairs a satellite, was renowned for
its scientific accuracy in terms of what would actually happen in
space.
 Soft Science Fiction
• Soft science fiction is characterized by a focus on social sciences, like
anthropology, sociology, psychology, and politics— in other words, sciences
involving human behavior
• Mainly address the possible scientific consequences of human behavior. For
example, the Disney animated film Wall-E is an apocalyptic science fiction story
about the end of life on Earth as a result of man’s disregard for nature
• In truth, soft and hard sci fi can be combined. Soft sci-fi allows audiences to
connect on an emotional level, and hard sci-fi adds real scientific evidence so that
they can imagine the action actually happening
• Sci-fi has endless number of subgenres, including but not limited to time travel,
apocalyptic, utopian/dystopian, alternate history, space opera, and military
science fiction
 IMPORTANCE OF SCIENCE FICTION
Many times, science fiction turns real scientific theories into full stories about
what is possible and/or imaginable. Many stories use hard facts and truths of
sciences to:

• suggest what could really happen in the future

• to explore what could happen if certain events or circumstances came to be or
• suggest consequences of technological and scientific advancements and
innovation

• It is a particularly fascinating and mind-bending genre for audiences because

of its connection to reality.
DETECTIVE STORY
 DETECTIVE STORY
• Detective story, type of popular literature in which a crime is introduced
and investigated and the culprit is revealed. The traditional elements of the
detective story are:

• the seemingly perfect crime;

• the wrongly accused suspect at whom circumstantial evidence points;
• the bungling of dim-witted police;
• the greater powers of observation and superior mind of the detective; and
• the startling and unexpected denouement, in which the detective reveals
how the identity of the culprit was ascertained
 DETECTIVE STORY
• Detective stories frequently operate on the principle that superficially
convincing evidence is ultimately irrelevant.
• Usually it is also axiomatic that the clues from which a logical solution
to the problem can be reached be fairly presented to the reader at
exactly the same time that the sleuth receives them and that the
sleuth deduce the solution to the puzzle from a logical interpretation
of these clues
COMIC BOOK/
STRIP
 COMIC BOOK
• A magazine that presents a serialized story in the form
of a comic strip, typically featuring the adventures of a
superhero
• A comic is bound collection of comic strips, usually in
chronological sequence, typically telling a single story
or a series of different stories
Benefits of
a
Comic Book
 Reading
• Comics provide narrative experiences for students just beginning to read and for
students acquiring a new language
• Images support the text and give students significant contextual clues to word
meaning
• As Stephen Cary, a second language learner specialist and author of Going Graphic:
Comics at Work in the Multilingual Classroom, says: “Comics provide authentic
language learning opportunities for all students…. The dramatically reduced text of
many comics make them manageable and language profitable for even beginning
level readers.”
• Even after students learn to be strong readers comics give students the opportunity
to read material which combines images with text to express satire, symbolism,
point of view, drama, puns and humor in ways not possible with text alone
 Writing
• Many students read fluently, but find it difficult to write. They complain
that they don’t know what to write. They have ideas, but they lack the
written language skills to create a beginning, follow a sequence of ideas and
then draw their writing to a logical conclusion
• Allowed to use words and images they will resolve problems of storytelling
which they would not otherwise experience using words alone.
• Comics provide a scaffolding so that students experience success in their
writing.
• Using Comic Life students have a new publishing medium. Comic Life
documents can be printed, emailed to parents or posted as a website very
easily
 Key benefits of using comics
in education
• A great visual Representation of Knowledge
• Presents what is essential
• Easier to remember a visual graphic containing key
information
• Engaging through thinking, creating and writing.
• Perfect avenue for writing dialogue
• Incites students with low interest in writing
 Key benefits of using comics in
education
• Helps organization through storytelling and storyboarding
• Using visual images convey meaning to a story or topic
• Develops creative and higher level thought processes
• Develops composition techniques through visual-verbal
connections
• Enriches reading, writing, and thinking
• Serves as and assessment and evaluation tool
• Sequencing promotes understanding
 CHALLENGES
FACING POPULAR
LITERATURE
 CHALLENGES FACING POPULAR
LITERATURE
• Post-modernism - it can cause a proliferation of texts. Literature and theory
have assisted in its decline mainly because postmodern argue that text and
meaning are inherently separate—can’t get there from here. It’s all
subjective. It doesn’t mean. “All writing is lying.” Upon hearing these
statements made by the very people who study and produce literature, the
common reader will say, “All right, I believe you. Think I’ll watch some TV.”
• Mass media - There is a lot more to do in our free time than read, most of
which is easier than reading. Reading is a task that requires time and effort
(usually); you can’t pitch convenience or speed to someone when
discussing literature. Movies are more action-packed TV entertains; video
games excite; the internet always has a myriad of things to do. Why read?
 CHALLENGES FACING POPULAR
LITERATURE
• Lots of books are bad - They just are. Bad works of literature
negatively affect the works that have lasting merit; people who
have had a bad experience reading rarely try again to enjoy it
• Rise of other academic subjects - because there are a lot more
options for a scholar these days. International Relations, Biology,
Art, Poli-Sci, Philosophy, Languages, Women’s Studies, et al.
• No automatic connection to a job after college - The disciplines
that have an automatic field ready-made for the graduate are few
 CHALLENGES FACING POPULAR
LITERATURE
• Inaccessibility - This debate is one I’ve touched on before: if a work of
literature is dazzlingly brilliant but no one can understand it, is it
good? However, when the artist writes above the common reader’s
ability to comprehend, readers will be alienated
• Overly-academic language - Academics have invented complicated
terminology for everything. This is not necessarily something bad–
terminology often aids specificity and education; however, when
academic vocabulary gets out of hand (and it can), then a piece loses
its utility
 CHALLENGES FACING POPULAR
LITERATURE
• Death of aesthetics - No appreciation of art. Why does art of any kind
matter? Well, what else aside from art slows us down? What else
shows us beauty, beauty so amazing and alarming that we have to
appreciate it? From where do we gain insight into existence?