My philosophy in teaching literature for young adults.

"I realised the amazing power of literature and of the human imagination generally: to make the dead live and to stop the living from dying."

- by IVAN KLIMA, Love and Garbage

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"I tell my students, it's not difficult to identify with somebody like yourself, somebody next door who looks like you. What's more difficult is to identify with someone you don't see, who's very far away, who's a different color, who eats a different kind of food. When you begin to do that then literature is really performing its wonders."

- by Chinua Achebe

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          The quotes above have greatly inspired me in developing my own philosophy. Like the blog's title itself, 'literature is life, life is literature', literature can teach one about life; either about the modern life or the life before the World War. When one says the word literature, what comes to mind? For me, literature makes you think. It makes you ponder. What do I ponder about? About everything; about relationships, responsibilities, differences, sameness; about life as a whole. Literature teaches you how to think critically about some things. It tells you everything under one genre. It tells you about moral values and humanity, and about history and facts.

          The second quote tells that it is one of the purposes of reading literature, to get to know something that is far beyond our reach. For example, I do not like history subject that much before this. But when I have read some literature works, I began to questions the actions that happened in the story like; 'Why did this person do that?' or 'What is happening at that particular time of the story?'. I came across all of these questions while reading and watching literature works such as the animation A Monster In Paris and Anastasia and the writing works such as The Great Gatsby and Heart of Darkness. Most of the time, after I have watch or read those literature works, I will search for the story behind the animation or the text itself. This is because most of the literature are stories of people who might have been living through a particular era of history. However, when the story is made into film, the facts may have been altered to make the story more interesting.