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Jul 6, 2009

"When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young." --Maya Angelou

Why Fiction Can Be Good For You

"For more than two thousand years people have insisted that reading fiction is good for you. Aristotle claimed that poetry -- he meant the epics of Homer and the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, which we would now call fiction -- is a more serious business than history. History, he argued, tells us only what has happened, whereas fiction tells us what can happen, which can stretch our moral imaginations and give us insights into ourselves and other people. This is a strong argument for schools to continue to focus on the literary arts, not just history, science, and social studies." This article explores how fiction can help us better understand ourselves and others.