Good literature enlightens, great literature inspires action
- Showing the truth, holding a mirror in front of us
- Seeing what goes wrong and where we need to take action
- Inform about things that you didn’t know before so u have to change it ( take action)
- Cause u to think twice about what you read and how it may affects you
- 1984 showed what could happen – surveillance
- → it concerns me now and caused that i am more aware and take action for instance being more careful with my devices
- Without reading it, we wouldn’t have noticed it in the first place
Reading a book can have the same effect on you as for instance holding a mirror in front of you. A mirror shows you how you really look, without a filter or cover up.
Books do a similar thing. Books reveal the truth and with this idea we open our eyes and see how our society really works and what is really behind the big face of a leader.
Those things are shown to us in the 1984 novel from George Orwell. We get confronted with the Big Brother as a leader saying “Big Brother is watching you” but throughout the book we question if he is real or just a role that the government made up to manipulate its citizen.
Those concerns make us think about our own society and where we get manipulated.
We begin to open our eyes to what is obvious and even though we just read about a dystopian world, we ask ourselves if it is really so different from the one we are living in.
The uncomfortable moments in a text teach us the most
- Dystopian texts are so successful because of that
- We remember it through emotions
- We start paying attention
- Maybe you question yourself why you feel that way
- Maybe it relates to the real world and that is what scares you
The movie “Minority Report” directed by Steven Spielberg carries us into a society that seems so far from the one we are currently living in. The movie shows a dystopian future version of the world and how our society could develop.
Those features are brought to us in a disturbing way which makes us feel uncomfortable, even almost scared. We might find ourselves questioning why we are feeling that way in a particular scene. Maybe it is disgust or anxiety. Associating our emotions to specific moments in the film leads to a better memory of those scenes.
While asking why we might have those emotions we refer back to the film scene and try to analyse these by understanding the cause of our reaction.
With most things in life we have to experience them before we are able to learn or understand the depthful meaning of those. Having a bad experience or associating painful emotions with it, help us to learn from these because we do not want to feel that way again.
Good decisions come from experience and experience comes from bad experiences.
As this quote underlines the statement before, bad experiences help us to learn what we have to be careful about and where we need to take action.