Comparing Dante's Inferno, Romeo And Juliet, And Gone With The Wind

My perception of literature is anything written by an author for the consumption of an audience. By my own definition literature should include literary works from throughout the ages, but for some reason the word literature conjures up images of “Dante’s Inferno”, “Romeo, and Juliet”, and “Gone with the Wind”. After reading how literature is described in “The Norton Introduction to Literature”, I gained a deeper view of what literature is. There are many forms of literature including oral literature, graphic novels, and comic strips. Critically thinking about literature is important to the world because it allows you to explore a story from the point of view of the writer. When not just reading, but thinking about what you read you can gain

a lot from literary works. As a child, I used to read fiction books as an escape, and I found myself empathizing and thinking about the characters long after the pages were done. This may seem trivial, but being able to immerse yourself into the mind of someone else can have a lasting impact on how you understand the world.
The genres that are involved in literature are fiction, poetry, and drama, and the genres contain subgenres that are more descriptive. I learned that classifying what is literature and what’s not its’s as simple as I thought it was. There are lots of categories and subcategories, and genres that fit into multiple genres. I would say my favorite literary genre is fiction because I enjoy living outside my own world, and going on an adventure, even if it’s only in my imagination.
In the story the "The Elephant in the Village of the Blind” the villager’s perception of what an elephant is differs. Some of the perceptions were that an elephant is a fringed rope, water pipe, washing tub, smooth staff, leather fan, and a rough pillar. Each of the villager’s perceptions was based on what part of the elephant they happen to touch. The fringed rope is the tail, the pillar the elephant’s legs, the fan is the elephant’s large ears, the staff is the tusk, and the head a large tub. Though each villager was right in their individual depiction of the elephant, they were unable to see the whole picture so they were blind to what an elephant really was. When the villagers could put all the pieces together they could understand what an elephant looked like even while being physically blind.