In the 1850s, digging in the ruins of Nineveh in what is now northern Iraq, excavators carried off thousands of clay tablets from the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal. Among them, recognized only in 1872, were pieces of a poem about a king who loses his closest friend and goes looking for a way to escape death. That poem was already very old when those tablets were made. People have told stories for as long as there are records of people, and literature is the part of that habit that has been shaped with care, kept and handed on. In this course, literature means writing, and carefully composed oral tradition, valued for its use of language and form, not only for the information it carries. World literature means reading across that whole human record rather than along one nation's shelf.

Why stories matter

Stories do several jobs at once. They preserve a people's memory of where it came from and what it fears. They test values, setting up a hard choice and making us live through it. And they let us into other minds. Fiction lets a reader experience a point of view not their own from the inside, which is why defenders of literature often link it to moral imagination. Some psychology studies have reported that reading literary fiction briefly improves people's skill at reading others' emotions, but later attempts to repeat those results have given mixed results, so the claim is best held loosely. The older and sturdier point is simpler: it is harder to treat a person as a mere object once a story has made you see the world through eyes like theirs.

Critics reply that literature can also do the opposite: stories have glorified conquest, mocked minorities and made cruelty look noble. That tension runs through every level here: literature can widen sympathy or narrow it, and reading well includes noticing which is happening.

Reading closely

Close reading means paying careful attention to the words, images and structure of a passage and asking what each choice does. A close reader slows down. Why this word and not a plainer one? Why does the line break here? What repeats? What is missing? The habit is ancient, from rabbinic commentary on single verses of scripture to Chinese scholars annotating the classics line by line.

A few tools help. The first is the voice. The narrator is the voice that tells a story, and it is not the same as the author. Some narrators can be trusted; others cannot. An unreliable narrator is one whose account the reader has reason to doubt, because the teller is naive, self-serving, confused or lying. The second tool is point of view: first person ("I"), third person limited (staying close to one character), or omniscient (knowing everything, everywhere).

The third tool is figurative language. A metaphor says one thing is another; a simile says one thing is like another. Images that recur across a work gather meaning as they go. The fourth is structure: where a work begins and ends, what it repeats and what it holds back. Finally there is theme. A theme is the larger idea or question a work explores. It is best stated as a sentence rather than a single word: not just "death" but "facing death can make an ordinary life feel precious."

Text and context

Close reading alone can miss things. Context is the historical, cultural and personal setting in which a work was made and read, and it can change what a line means. A joke about a foolish king lands differently when a real king's censor is reading it. A good reader moves between the two: claims must rest on what is actually on the page, but context explains why it is there.

One more caution. Readers from one culture easily judge another culture's work by their own habits. A Japanese Noh play that feels slow to a newcomer was not trying to be fast. Asking "what was this work trying to do, and for whom?" before asking "do I like it?" is a basic courtesy of reading across the world. (For writing clearly about what you read, see WRIT; for the art of persuasion, see RHET.)

Worked example: a walking shadow

Take a famous passage from Shakespeare's Macbeth, first performed around 1606, spoken just after Macbeth hears that his wife is dead: "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage / And then is heard no more." Read closely. Life is first a "shadow", something without substance, then a "poor player", a bad actor. The verbs "struts and frets" are restless and vain, and "his hour" shrinks a lifetime to the length of a performance. Because the metaphor is theatrical and spoken by an actor on a real stage, the audience is quietly included: we are players too.

The theme is not simply "death." It is closer to "a life built on ambition can come to feel empty." Context deepens that reading. Macbeth has murdered his way to the crown, and the speech is the sound of a man discovering he has destroyed the very meaning he wanted. The play lets us feel his despair from the inside while seeing from the outside that it is the fruit of his own choices. That double view, inside and outside a person at once, is something literature does better than almost any other human invention.