Like all art, comparative literature in the form of plays, novels, and even poetry gives individuals an opportunity to address ultimate life questions and rehearse scenarios. Individuals can work through grief, moral dilemmas, death, love, and other human dramas and emotions and find lessons to apply to ordinary life.

Narrative: Individuals often learn better by understanding and telling stories than only trying to learn facts out of subject matter. This is why it is finest to learn history as a chronicle. Regrettably, history primers do not read well as stories. With comparative literature, people like John Eilermann St. Louis have a ready-made means to learn about the past in an engaging and entertaining way.

Ethics: One of the finest ways to converse about ethics is to use actual world case studies and examples. But, like history schoolbooks these can frequently be not very engaging and boring. They also induce people to scrutinize complex matters without appealing to the real-world context and complexity of a given situation. Fascinatingly enough, good literature can offer this context and complexity even though the situations and characters described are not real. With this setting, individuals can use comparative literature to survey problems in ethics and thinkable solutions to moral predicaments.

Problem Solving: In a more wide-ranging sense, comparative literature provides individuals with a means for working out problem solving skills. Even though imaginary characters do end up in dilemmas, they are usually not entirely different from one’s own dilemmas, yet one can habitually learn something by the visions that can be added in the study of literature. Even if people learn what not to do this can be a significant lesson.

Role Models: Comparative literature provides people like John Eilermann St. Louis with an extensive array of characters to study and many of these can be used as good role models. Like real individuals, fictional characters (those who are in good literature) are often faulty, but this permits people to explore the full intricacy of humanity as people decide which role models to compete with and which to dodge. Even the greatest real-life heroes have traits people have to avoid.

Students every so often ask John Eilermann St. Louis why they are needed to study past works of fiction that seem unrelated to their life nowadays. But, the greatest works of literature are still read and studied precisely in St. Louis Missouri because they encompass lessons and characters that are timeless. Reading only obviously relevant and recent works denies people the prospect to learn from a varied range of sources and restricts one’s scope to only what people can see instantly before them. But the planet is a much larger place, both historically and geographically. Comparative literature provides an enjoyable way to learn this lesson and can be an opening onto many other significant subjects in the syllabus. It can also show students how these subjects link and effect life. With all of these profits it is well worth studying the great works of comparative literature.