Literature is an imaginative or creative thinking. As music does, it plays a great role in emotional & social rejuvenation of a person. 

I agree with Prof. Judeh's view. I consider that the positive impact of literature on emotional and social rejuvenation of a person is noticeable.

One's cultural values are broadened with more readings including social, behavioral, psychological, and humane discourses spread in the literature. However, there should be a purpose to seek certain literary choices including cross-cultural and cross-national literature which adds more to the person's dealings with others irrespective of their race, nationality, color, religion, sex, or other...

Certainly, in the literature enriches the imagination and passion fueling when the reader.

I don't have a direct answer; but the clue, which I am providing may be useful for your research.   

Recently, DST has come with asked for proposals for sponsored projects for Yoga and Meditation.  Please ref to the following link:  

http://www.dst.gov.in/callforproposals/call-research-proposals-2016-17-science-and-technology-yoga-and-meditation-satyam  

Regards, 

Dr. S. Ravindran  

I am actually reading the novels of Amitav Gosh, in the Italian translation, and precisely feeling the emotional experience that - I surely agree - is so important in our daily life.

What I love about great literature is that it allows us to think far beyond the distinction of literary genres: fiction, non-fictions, and the like. A real human life cannot be possible without literature. Not to mention the very love for words.

Yes Carlos I do agree with you because literature adds a flavor to life. Fiction or non Fiction, whatever it may be, that reflects the situations and real life experiences in a better way by adding some thing to make the reader interesting to read with full of concentration.

Literature is a refuge of our fantasy. Even though it may not have anything to do with the real world, literature satisfies our need for fiction, for projecting our own individualities in fictional personalities, of becoming a character in the book we read. It has been scientifically proved that masses of people who haven't had the privilege of reading novels, of transforming themselves in fictional individualities have become emotional labile. That is why the great totalitarian rulers have failed in their way to greatness... because they restricted the reading sector and they forbid some really important novels and fictions, that are so meaningful for the readers, the people fought against them and demanded new rights.

Thus literature has a major importance in our society, because it defines us as individuals and it makes us better persons.

Literature not only play a great role in emotional & social rejuvenation of a person, but also making peaceful calm.

I strongly feel so, it helps.

I would just stress "great" literature which indeed does play a great role. The challenge of developing a fine taste for good and great literature is something that cannot go without saying.

If you read French, here's an interesting article about literature and empathy. http://correspo.ccdmd.qc.ca/index.php/document/tentative-de-rehabilitation-du-lieu-commun/lecture-et-empathie-la-litterature-au-coeur-de-la-relation-soignant-soigne/

As Sophie has shown, literature can play a significant role in increasing empathy.  On the cognitive side, we should consider that individuals vary in how they store memories of literature and what associated memories they may have for it.  A person reading Shakespeare for pleasure will react better to literature and the empathy a text may show than someone who associates Shakespeare--say--with a parent who forced him or her to memorize lines to recite at family gatherings.  This is covered in the 1987 study _Reading Texts: Reading, Responding, and Writing_ by Kathleen McCormick, Gary Waller, and Linda Flowers.  This text gave rise to "Reader response" theory in the united States. 

Here is a brief description of Reader Response Theory...

"A theory, which gained prominence in the late 1960s, that focuses on the reader or audience reaction to a particular text, perhaps more than the text itself. Reader-response criticism can be connected to poststructuralism’s emphasis on the role of the reader in actively constructing texts rather than passively consuming them. Unlike text-based approaches such as New Criticism, which are grounded upon some objective meaning already present in the work being examined, reader-response criticism argues that a text has no meaning before a reader experiences—reads—it. The reader-response critic’s job is to examine the scope and variety of reader reactions and analyze the ways in which different readers, sometimes called “interpretive communities,” make meaning out of both purely personal reactions and inherited or culturally conditioned ways of reading. The theory is popular in both the United States and Germany; its main theorists include Stanley Fish, David Bleich, and Wolfgang Iser. "

LINK:  https://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/glossary-terms/detail/reader-response-theory

I recommend the following article:

Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind

David Comer Kidd*,

Emanuele Castano*

Science  18 Oct 2013:

Vol. 342, Issue 6156, pp. 377-380

DOI: 10.1126/science.1239918

Hussin Jose Hejase Sir,

Thanks for sharing views. you describe importance of cross cultural literature & different aspects of discourses spread in literature.

Mahfuz Judeh Sir,

Thanks for indulge in literature perspective,your views like Music  literature is also creative one that play a role.

Aristidis Matsoukis Sir,

Thanks for sharing views,you emphasizing positive impact of literature on person.

H. K. Hisham sir,

thanks for giving idea about enrichment of passion through literature.

Francesco Spagna sir,

Thanks for agree with my view,you feel emotional experience through literature.

Carlos Eduardo Maldonado sir,

Thanks for your universal idea about literature .A real human life cannot be possible without literature.If every human should indulge in literature then human revelries gone out.

Gomatam Mohana Charyulu sir,

thanks for sharing idea, literature reflects  strong situations and real life experiences in a better way & human  will add more flavor in life.

Dibakar Pal Sir,

Thanks for sharing view about literature that corrects & modifies our way of life and behavior and give better acceptability to himself & society.. 

Dilip Kumar Kundu Sir,

Thanks for sharing view about literature that literature define individuals and  makes us better human.you emphasis importance of literature  in our society.

Subhash C. Kundu Sir,

Thanks for sharing view about literature that spread peace in human mind .Peace is  important for our world.

Niranjan Biswal Sir,

Thanks for your feeling about literature.

Carlos Eduardo Maldonado sir,

thanks for your idea, you stress on greatness of literature.

Sophie Vincent madam,

Thanks for sharing article about literature.

Gloria Lee Mcmillan Madam,

Thanks for sharing views, you describe  Reader Response Theory & should consider memories of literature that impact on individual.

Well, the very role of poetry is the rejuvenation of the language; so literature, speech and novelty are altogether members of "reality". Literature is a part of the real world, not a mere imitation or an ornamental tool. The interpretation is the key to understand the sense of art in general, and the interpretation is our way to exist. So emotions and intellectual operations are inseparable. In literature and in life.

Literature plays a great role in social and emotional rejuvenation as it leads to catharsis of our emotions of pity and pain as we identify with the characters in the literary works.

Well said Roberto, blessed are those who are able to express reality with poetry, speech and novelty. And as Sharmila mentioned emotions of pity, pain from one side and joy and happiness from another side are well expressed with the literature which therefore may act as an important element for change.

literature is life

UNESCO have recognized a body of literature by including it in UNESCO's Memory of the World - Register for Documentary Heritage. This archive of written material comes from the oral tradition of the First People of Southern Africa who spoke the /xam language, which is now extinct. Why this is important is because many of these stories challenge contemporary perceptions. For one, the /xam-speaking San acceptance of co-creation has much to say on the topic ethical sensibility, not only between people and people, or individual and community but between person and the sentient world as such.

Fully agree with Your statement

Roberto Gigliucci,

thanks for your opinion emotions and intellectual operations are inseparable. In literature and  life.

Sharmila Sameer Jajodia madam,

Thanks for your point of view catharsis of our emotions of pity and pain depicted in characters of literary works.

Hussin Jose Hejase Sir,

Thanks for your similar views with Roberto and Sharmila ,blessed,happiest are those who able to express reality in form of joy & pity in  literature.

Adesiyan Rebecca Madam,

you correlate life with literature,they are made for each other.

Neil Rusch & Vijay More  Sir,

Thanks for sharing views.

Literature deals mostly with human issues- human conflicts and resolutions, the varying spectrums of human emotions and motivations, the innumerable contexts of human experiences. All these will be part of the reader's experience. In the end he becomes spiritually and emotionally richer by drawing and learning from the literary texts.

The answer could (and should) be "of course," but there are too many individual and societal differences for such a pat response.  Consider all the variables:  the actual piece of literature being read--its quality, its form; its themes; the reader's past experiences, including childhood reading and other exposure to creativity; the reader's current situations; etc.  

I give few examples how literature played great roles in promoting nationalism in Indian subcontinent. Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay's word "vande mataram" inspired all Indians for their freedom movement against the foreign rulers. Songs of the great poets R.N. Tagore and Kazi Nazrul Islam inspired entire Bangladeshi nation for their freedom movement in 1970s. In India, poet Iqbal's writing is used to promote patriotism in general public and defence personnel even today.

Wolfgang F. Schwarz Sir,

Thanks for giving Links  to related thought.

Ren Draya Sir,

Thanks for you consider view about literature that rejuvenate of a person.

Dilip Kumar Kundu sir,

Thanks for  your view concerning literature that played great role in promoting nationalism.

Lajiman Janoory Sir,

Thanks for sharing view concerning about literary context that play important  role to become richer to human spiritually and emotionally.

Respected Kiran Madam,

It gives me immense pleasure to share my views on literature in general as well as in particular..

After all as it has been rightly pointed out by Paulo Coelho , " It is the journey itself, not the destination that matters most."

Let us come together to enjoy the jouney..

Vijay

Vijay More Sir,

literature is not destination,its the journey itself ,this view lead to life that conclude life & literature both are part of journey.

When we study literature actually we actually we are looking for our own self. We want to align with the hero so either we rejuvenate the traits we already possess and coincide with the hero or try to acquire same traits as that of hero in the genre. Thus literature is nothing endorsement to our emotional life and social roles.

Vijay Grover ji,

thanks for sharing views concerning literature that endorse our emotional life and social roles.

Wolfgang F. Schwarz · Sir,

Thanks for sharing valuable idea & giving links about emotional & social rejuvenation through literature.

Dear Prof. Kiran Grover and all,

Damian Baca's work as fairly recent chair of the University of Arizona's Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English is seeking to "de-familiarize" Aristotle, the Greek and classical tradition, by emphasizing, instead, the several roots of rhetoric geographically. 

By extension this also means instead of the unipolar classical tradition, we have rhetoric and the sister arts springing from a number of sites in Africa, Asia, Australia, and Europe. Not single-culture challenges to a dominant culture but a network showing interconnectivity. This will help people to see that our ways of rhetorical logic, of reading, have been conditioned and modified by the "bleached out" and northern European resembling Aristotle who was constructed in the Enlightenment rather than the cusp of north Africa Aristotle. 

Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy is a good place to review how we are shaped in our reading of literature by the forces of history and current events.  Arnold in his time was telling the value of literature in response to people in the throes of rigid hierarchies and the industrial revolution.

http://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=peter-logan-on-culture-matthew-arnolds-culture-and-anarchy-1869

I know we studied Arnold in Victorian literature class as undergrads.  But reading this background makes me think that we did not entirely understand what was going on.

Full disclosure. We in rhetoric theory (Sonja Foss, Victor Vitanza, Ernst Bormann, Iris Ruiz) find it important to situate ourselves and not to speak as disembodied subject positions, so..this text passage from the source above was of great interest to me, since I was a student in a steel mill region (like Germany's Ruhr Valley) trying to find what made sense in literature:

CITED

"In one of the most well known incidents, on 23 July 1866, a large crowd gathered at Hyde Park in London to hear speakers on voting rights. They were confronted by police when the government declared the meeting an illegal assembly. Soldiers were called out when 200,000 people entered the park anyway, knocking down fences meant to keep them out. The incident precipitated Arnold’s thinking, and its violence represents the “Anarchy” in Culture and Anarchy. While staunchly opposing violence, he nevertheless understood the need for social change. As one of his biographers notes, Arnold’s job as a School’s Inspector exposed him “to more working-class children than any other poet who has ever lived” (Honan 218-19). The injection of social change into his new theory was the formula he sought to combine his own love of fine art with social utility."

END CITE

I also appreciate the Arnold said of democracy:

CITED

"The idea of free trade was machinery, but machinery that is fetishized when people think of it as intrinsically valuable, a goal unto itself, rather than a means to an end. Examples of machinery included an uncritical faith in the value of population growth, or industrial production, or railroads, or the accumulation of wealth, or even individual liberty. People idolized the concept of democracy, he claimed, forgetting that it was a means to social justice, and what we care about is social justice, not the idol of democracy itself."

END CITE

Arnold analyzed the chaos of his own times.  Much of his writing is in dialectical form a push--considerations of where that might lead with no resistance--then a pull.  The web site reminds of of what was valuable in my education and now I am learning from Damian Baca because

CITED

"in Culture and Anarchy, culture is a process, “Not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming,” and so one is never completely free nor successful in acquiring culture but rather always unfinished, to one degree or another, and thus still enmeshed in the social, still to some extent a “slave of thought” (94). In such a predicament, one must continue pursuing intellectual freedom while simultaneously realizing that one never actually has it."

END CITE

Gloria Lee Mcmillan Madam,

Thanks for giving valuable thoughts &  links concerning query.

Wolfgang F. Schwarz Sir,

Thanks indulging in discussion that give wide background of humanity through literature.

Dear Prof. Grover,

Please pardon my leaving off the personal address to you and this group in my previous post on this question.  I am shocked that I did so, since everyone here is so generous in sharing information and wise interpretations.

Gloria Lee Mcmillan Madam,

please do not mind this act, I am sharing with you  routine matter.

American authors tend to have an easier time making political or social commentary in the genres of Science Fiction or the Gothic novel than other means in my experience. Setting one's story in the future, the past, or in a different galaxy removes the immediate threat of offending readers, while still allowing authors to reference political points or make political statements. See Gene Roddenberry's original Star Trek or for an example regarding American politics in science fiction or Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor for an example of historical British naval imperialism in gothic fiction. 

 My opinion is YES. Nowadays, people are going behind the whealth and money.  I wonder whether people have time to spend to  relax or for holidays .  Rich persons have their assistants but the problem is with the working class.   

Kevin R Waller ji,

thanks for sharing views towards literature.

Dr. Ravindran S. Sir,

people are not aware our future so literature lead us.thanks for sharing idea regarding  query.

Yes it does

Respected Dr Kiran Madam,

What I do really feel is that Literature and Human life correlates each other. Literature is the mirror of our emotions and feelings.our human feelings constitutes the literature in proper way or vice versa.

Vijay More Sir,

Thanks for sharing your point of view,Literature is mirror of our emotions that constitutes the literature .

Oluwafemi Samson Balogun Sir,

Thanks for involving in query.

• Yes literature  play a vital role in emotional  and rejuvenate a person personally socially which impacts  allwalks of human life. Without  reading  literature ones life is imperfect  at all today .

This is essentially a YES or NO question and the way it is structured does not allow much room for exploration, discovery and nuance. At best, it is a circular fallacy in which the question is set up to affirm the premise. A response "No, it does not" is just as sound as the numerous "Yes, it does" answers.

It would be far more interesting to pose an open question about WAHT literature does and HOW it does that. For surely there is more to the stuff of literature than "emotional situations and moral dilemmas." An opening query would be "What is the stuff of literature, what psychological effects has it been observed to have and how does it produce or contribute to these effects?

Yes Literature plays a vital role in emotional and rejuvenate a person in that it is life and it mirrors the society

Kumara Swamy Ravipati,

Thanks for sharing your views, about literature your point of view is without reading literature ones life is imperfect at all today. that idea is appealing one.

Catherine Adoyo,

 Thanks for indulging in discussion, literature produce emotional situations and moral dilemmas.

Adesiyan Rebecca Madam,

Thanks for your point of view about literature is the mirror of society.

When does a person need to have recourse to emotional and social rejuvenation? And it means what?  Failing to understand which answers might go stretched out.  Anyways will come back to it 

Since literature reflects life it has the moral responsibility to have an impact on the emotional aspect of the readers. F. R. Levis elaborates this in his critical treatise. Anton Chekhov's story  "The Bet" also proves this purposes of literature.

Judith Sophia,

Thanks for sharing your views, about literature your point of view is without reading literature reflects life it has the moral responsibility to have an impact on the emotional aspect of the readers.

Respected Colleague Kiran Glover and Others,

I often see literature as a way to know people in crisis that differs from quantified analysis. 

The gulf between empirical scientific methods of viewing the world and cosmos and literature's way of detailing the minute bits and minute-by-minute scenes make it hard for the two to communicate. 

The arts and sciences are not equal partners. The world of military-industrial-business carries far more weight.  The best way I see (as a writer/artist who is married to a scientist) is involve oneself in work that is centered around these issues of literary "subjectivity" and scientific "objectivity" and measuring the costs and benefits of each approach, where both can be used together.

This process, called for long ago by C. P Snow in his lectures about "the Two Cultures" is what can help people deal cognitively AND emotionally with the crises and challenges they are facing.

Thanks for such an interesting topic.

Gloria

Literature can play significant role in the building of a nation in 3 ways: (1) as a cultural bonding force, (2) as an educative medium to boost up the moral of people in the time of crisis, and (3) as a means of arousing patriotism of the people under a foreign rule.

Gloria Lee Mcmillan Madam,

Thanks for indulging in discussion, literature produce emotional situations and moral dilemmas.you give scientific approach to see the world then literati also consider for your suggestionsThanks a lot.

Dilip Kumar Kundu Sir,

Thanks for indulging in discussion, Literature can play significant role in cultural bonding, moral bond &  arousing patriotism.it's important for human who indulge in literature.

Literature is one of the principal units of the humanities. Its many forms humanise the mind, reset the creative capacity, and polish the experience of an individual to learn life's lessons from (real life or imagined) stories, particularly how to pursue society's positive goals or empathise with those that have flawed in the pursuit.

In our endeavor to follow a conscious path in nurturing good practices in higher education, the pillar of literature to support intellectual inquiry is taken very seriously by Al Maaref University. Indeed the comments presented here are valuable and must be thought about.

Chuka Fred Ononye Sir,

Thanks for sharing your opinion.

Chuka Fred Ononye Sir,

 Your view related to literature is really appreciable that's Literature is one of the principal units of the humanities.

Dibakar Pal  Sir,

Your answer is recommendable & I am very much impressed from your saying: Literature is the outcome of Catharsis.

Hussin Jose Hejase Sir,

Thanks for sharing your views.

Literature shapes  the wholesome personality of an earnest reader. Literary language appeals to the emotions of a person. To some extent it creates an empathy that makes the lover of literature think with the heart and feel with the mind. It also affects the inner being of a person and helps him/her get transformed from within.

I think it is an unreal idea about literature if we take it for granted, but it may contribute to some extent.

Judith Sophia,

Thanks,your thinking is very impressive that is Literature shapes the wholesome personality.

Hani Al-Ebadi,

Thanks for giving your opinion.

Certainly. Literature plays a powerful role in the revitalization of one's emotions and in the social lives of readers. Great is its impact when the words amd story plot are carefully dramatized and these words vividly paint the emotions such that the imagery described is felt as if the reader is literally walking into the action portrayed. That is the great impacts that literature have on people. Best regards

Dickson Adom

Literature encompasses fiction, poetry, screenplay, short stories, novels, and nowadays, even videos, films and documentaries. The entire world of literature does enhance our life and enlarge our possibilities. No question about this. 

 Dickson Adom Sir,

Thanks for sharing your views.

 Carlos Eduardo Maldonado,

  your thinking is recommendable that is  literature does enhance our life and enlarge our possibilities in the entire world.

Thanks to all research gate friends who indulging in discussion.