When Aaron Swan’s students ask him the perennial question, here’s what he likes to talk about

It’s a simple question, often brushed aside with a romantic answer: ‘Literature is about powerful and fantastic stories, worlds to explore, and people to fall in love with.’ But for many students, literature is not a thrill, nor an escape and certainly no love story. When aesthetic enjoyment fails, is there an objective reason for its study?

I like the National Curriculum’s categories of texts: heritage, poetry, modern novels and Shakespeare. I justify each from an objective and utilitarian point of view. These texts are taught not just because they each represent different kinds of aesthetic enjoyment, but because they represent a key to understanding the elements of the literary ecosystem. So how do we unlock utility of each category?

We explore why the heritage texts are considered canonical. They are texts which correlate with significant changes to our society. Texts like Beowulf mark the beginning of literature in England and a point at which our culture, heritage and tradition became written down. Texts like Frankensteincorrelate with a feminist movement where women were beginning to have a greater political positioning that had been denied to them. A Christmas Carol reflects a social movement in which workers were beginning to be protected from their employers via legislation. Heritage texts mark the significant milestones our culture has been through to mature to its current age. Of course, their impact might also be more than simply correlative: they might have been instrumental in building the values we celebrate today.

I like to talk about how poetry is an extension of a literature that precedes the written word. Oral traditions required that stories of culture, tradition, morality or rule of law be passed person to person. So important were these messages, that meter, rhyme and structure were constructed as a kind of safeguard to inhibit the decay of meaning over multiple exchanges. They are more than just mnemonics, or aide-memoirs; each individual word is a key that unlocks the metrical pattern and any alterations to these words fail to engage the mechanism of syllable, stress and tone, thus protecting the message within. When the graphemes of writing emerged atop the permanence of the page, one might have wondered if these safeguards had been replaced. But prosody did not disappear — it adapted. Epics like The Iliad and Beowulf retained the cadence of oral recitation, ensuring that the spoken word’s emotional power was not lost on the page. Over time, written poetry evolved into diverse forms, from structured sonnets to free verse, yet it never shed its origins. Even today, we see poetry’s oral legacy in song lyrics, spoken word performances, and the rhythmic storytelling of contemporary verse. A ‘gold standard’ for literature is still to be able to recite a poem from memory. Poetry, then, is more than just an artistic form — it is a bridge between the spoken word and the written word, a testament to humanity’s enduring need to preserve and share meaning across time.

I like to talk about how Shakespeare is only one example in the literary tradition of the power of dramatic appeal. His plays were crafted for performance, not for private reading, demonstrating the enduring power of stories to be heard collectively. Through soliloquies, wordplay, and poetic meter, Shakespeare captured the rhythms of human thought and emotion, making the spoken word an art-form in itself. Beyond poetic mastery, Shakespeare’s plays reveal literature’s power to shape society. Othello forces audiences to confront racial prejudice, King Lear explores power and madness, and The Tempest interrogates colonialism centuries before it became a widespread discourse. His words have echoed across time, influencing everything from political speeches to pop culture. Like Shakespeare, literary authors strive for the sublime; the awe at the profundity of the artistic work; the goosebumps; the edge-of-the-seat feel; the enigma of the what happens next.

I like to talk about how modern texts are a significant departure from the literature of pre-modernity. We outgrew centuries of aristocratic, theocratic and masculine hegemony. Where once there existed only the very narrow representations of power and privilege, now exists representations of minority, the working class and the emancipated. Modern texts are the voices that once were denied; they are texts which legitimise one’s existence – the existence of people other than from the dominant class. 

On the one hand, these forms help us to understand our tradition within literature. But there is something else above these forms. 

I talk about how texts are mirrors for our humanity, revealing to us both our vices and virtues. We can see presented back to us our emotions, our motivations and our desires. For scrutiny, authors place onto the page our very human nature, often because we don’t like to be confronted with what we are capable of. Aren’t we all a little bit Iago? Aren’t we all a little bit Victor Frankenstein?

One of the most interesting debates I have with students is how characters are given depth when authors engineer into their fictional existence the reality of our human nature. But to define our nature as human runs the risk of looking for those natures that are exclusive to humans. Animal rights activism, zoology, and evolutionary biology have been showing us for decades that animals are just as capable of ‘human nature’ as we are. ‘Our’ nature isn’t exclusive to humans. Be it tools, rules, art, community, monogamy or even agriculture, we find these civilities in other species. The more we learn and study the world around us, the less special our nature seems to be. And with each passing decade, the harder it becomes to find anything that is universally in the nature of the human. 

Texts like Lord Of The Flies can be studied principally because of the characters’ ability to be a mirror of our human nature, and as the rules of civilisation begin to fade from their community, on comes the innate barbaric behaviour that resides within us (at least as Golding seems to believe). The vices inherent in our nature must be controlled through social agreement, such social agreements exist in other natures. Focusing on what is exclusive to humans runs the risk of subjugating the natural world as capable only of barbarism. Nature is capable of emotions, nature is capable of motivations and desires, it is capable of order and society, rules and consequence through tribunal. 

Which brings me to one of my final answers to the perennial question why do we study literature. Maybe one of the few things, maybe the only thing that we do that is uniquely human, is that we record our history, culture, doubts, failures and successes for others to see, to think about and reflect upon, to be changed by. From the first cave drawings, the oral forms, to the longest novel, maybe only humans have a literary tradition. No other species has developed a sign system of permanence that is used to create a link between the past and the future that isn’t authentic observed experience or genetic inheritance. No other species can transfer tradition to others. And in these records, we exhibit something additional to the human nature that fleshes out the depth of the characters: we record our human condition. 

Literature explores the permeating questions that seem to be a condition of being human: where did we come from, where are we going, how can we survive this journey to wherever it ends, aren’t we too capable of cruelty to make it? 

Literature comes to our aid; Golding argues that our salvation is through a strict adherence to rules, even the petty and inconsequential. Priestly argues that an equitable society is our only salvation, “if men will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish.” In Macbeth, Shakespeare argues that loyalty to those ordained by the divine is our single path. Orwell warns us against the love of an authoritarian state… Each author is painting a pathway into the future from our distant history in answer to the questions of our human condition.

And so literature is more than just stories about culture and history. It’s more than a political message or a dramatic appeal. It’s more than just an expression of what we are like as people. It is a kind of anthropological study of what might be the most unique part of human nature. Studying literature is the study of an endeavour that isn’t repeated anywhere else in the natural world, and it is a supposition — an estimated guess — as to how we can thrive as a species. 

Why do we study literature? Because it is the only nature unique to humans, that has shaped the values we live by, that legitimises the oppressed and not the oppressor, that intends to thrill, through which we give hope to our future generations.