Allegories

What is an allegory? I had never thought about it, because I had never heard that word, or at least in the context we are in: Literature. What I now know by definition is that it is the meaning behind the elements in a piece of art that the author uses in order to convey a meaning, so that it can be interpreted, rather than be stated directly in the piece.

But of course everyone has dealt before with allegories, maybe not with art and neither conscious of what it was. But hidden messages... who has not done that before? Everyone has created a drawing with a meaning that nobody understands but them, or them and their close friends, family, etc. The point here is that the different elements within something that contain a meaning are allegories. 

It is important, in art for example, to have a background, to know who the author was, or maybe just the context he or she lived in. Many elements in a piece of art we can understand very easy, but it is because we have a background on it. Modern/ Contemporary art can be read easier by someone who does not have a lot of background in history, for example. This is because that person shares the same world and society with the author, so they can connect better and have communication, which is the objective of art: to tell something. 

That is why Greek or ancient art in general can be very hard to understand if there is not a proper background. The same can happen when dealing with abstract art, as its elements are very simple but convey a strong meaning. 

To my point of view, which I think many share, it is wonderful to be able to discover the message behind something and to be able to exploit that. Allegories are hidden messages waiting to be discovered. 

What is Literature?

After having used the term for more than half of my life, it was not but until these past few days that I, along with my teacher and classmates, took the time to build and analyze a convincent definition of what literature is. This recquired our experience with it and a lot of brainstorming about it to finally reach our precious definition.

So, what is Literature? There are as many definitions for literature as opinions exist. We usually think about words like reading, writing, novels, books, stories, poetry, library, words, art, written language, feelings, thoughts... the list can be endless. The challenge now is putting all this together to build the definition. We can build our definition like this:

"Literature is the art of writing, reading or analyzing written thoughts, ideas or feelings that are put into paper with written words, or better said, language; and this forms a book with stories, poems, etc."

I think the definition itself is clear, and convincing. But I loved that, by erasing some words, we could tell everything, but with less words. So our final definition was: "Literature is the art of language."

That is it! With that definition we could tell all about it. 

I still thought about it for a minute, as it was the first time I had truly analyzed the concept, and I didn't want to buy it without self-analyzing it.

But thinking about it, what did I think Literature was? I can honestly say that I related the term with thick books, long-plotted stories or a long-developed thesis statement. But I also related it to short stories, (like Poe's) or theatre plays (Shakespeare). And also poems. For me, Literature meant the text had to have a certain level of difficulty to read, and the ideas had to be very well organized and written in a way that would not resemble an ordinary person talking. With all this, I could not have had a very concrete definition, could I? And even though I like reading and I really enjoy writing, I could not know what literature was.

So back to the final definition, it finally convinced me. (And I learnt new things, like storytelling was part of Literature.) "Literature is the art of language".

• For Literature to be called an art, it has to have a certain level of quality and beauty.
• And it definitely tells us about language, not only written but talked.

So I cannot think of a better definition than that, gifting language with beauty, and making it not the common use of it. 

I guess I wasn't that lost. 

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