American Literature And Society

Literature is a very powerful tool that is used to make a huge impact on society or in someone's perspective. Literature comes in different forms and each literature form fits in a certain category or role to help understand the true meaning of it. From playwrights to short stories, each one has moral lesson, a message or a reflection of the author. I have witnessed the power of literature several times. Literature has moved teens to better being; it has motivated unfortunate people to fame, used as an educational process of teaching and most of all, entertainment. Back in the day, plays were on of the most famous forms of entertainment. Without television and radio present, plays served as a substitute to entertain certain groups of people like the royal family or just for the whole public. This was one way of making money by the actors and the authors that wrote the play. Also present during those times were the poem recitals. This is similar to a play but fewer people are present in the stage or sometimes solo performance. Today, Literature is still being used as a form of entertainment and educational intentions. Hollywood made a lot of money by revising the great masterpieces of famous authors such as "Rome and Juliet" by William Shakespeare. Also, they made movies out of hundreds of literary works for educational purposes and better understanding of the literature piece. Each form of literature has its own style. The style determines how it influences the audience to absorb the true meaning and moral of the story or poem. William Shakespeare and Benjamin Franklin were truly persuasive while Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe mixed mystery and adventure to their works. The style touches the readers which really makes a good relationship from the reader to the author's literary masterpieces.

Being a foreigner to this country, I have viewed American Society in a different way. There are a lot of factors that changed my perspective to the American society and of them is the literature I have studied during the process of having English as on of my major subjects. I can strongly say that American society is very much different than the environment I used to live. There may be similarities but there are few. American society tends to change a lot of times, its culture slowly evolves the American society to a whole different level. American society is full freedom. There are a lot of things that I could do here that I couldn't do in my homeland. Freedom was one of the things that I really noticed. I thought that this was a pretty good opportunity for me that I could live in a country like this. Knowing that freedom is abundant here, I thought that life here is easy. The more I stayed in America, the more things I experience in life that helped me reveal the reality of the true American society. Literature help me realize how the people think, and react to certain things in life.

Stories, dramas and poems are the ones that help me realize how American authors use these forms of literature to speak out to the public. The authors also want to share their experiences to the readers who never experience the same lifestyle as they did. The deep meanings of these stories and poems sometimes give me a descriptive meaning of how American society is sometimes harsh. One good example of this is the story of "The Crucible" by Arthur Miller. That was a good reflection of an old American society progressing to the present. I seriously thought that the whole witchcraft trials were very lame but now, I think that it really relates to the great discrimination that is happening in our society. The Crucible is a great reflection of discrimination of certain groups of people of today's society. In the story "Crucible", those who are accused of performing witchcrafts or carrying the name of a witch will be put into trial. The consequences are really cruel if the suspects were proven guilty. Death was one of the punishments feared by these who are accused of witchcraft. Without advance technology able to prove or show strong evidence that the suspects were witches, the Salem witch trial relied ion witnesses. The life of the accused lies in the hands of the choice of the witness; its either they tell the truth or not regarding the prosecution of the accused witch. The story also emphasizes on how the people in the village randomly picks who to accuse as a witch without reasonable evidence to accuse them. This story really altered my thought of today's American society