Writing a Counterargument: “One book for a poor person is all he or she needs to be inspired and change the world”

Good day, dear readers!


At the moment I'm very busy with working for university, so that's why I'm not showing that many signs of life... Nevertheless, today I want to share my latest piece of writing with you: In my English studies 'Writing Skills' class we were asked to write a counterargument against a statement of a text we read. So, this is my result~

“One book for a poor person is all he or she needs to be inspired and change the world”

I not necessarily agree with this claim since it is too vaguely describing a too big issue. Indeed literature can influence people’s ways of thinking, also in positive ways. Often we read about cases when people have been reading a certain piece of literature and have been that fascinated by it to take up own action and tried to change the world or at least themselves. For example, let us take James Frey into consideration: In his autobiography “A Million Little Pieces” he described how his lecture of the Tao helped him to find inner peace, compared to the “AA”-book against alcohol and drug addiction he was forced to read in rehabilitation.

But most times reading only a single book does not lead to a positive final result, especially not with poor, and maybe not too well educated, readers. The potential of them to interpret a single work too radically is high since they are searching the ultimate solution of their problems between the lines. We just have to take the book of the books, the Bible, into consideration: How many people have misinterpreted it by just literary believing what is written in there, without paying attention to the metaphorical use of language? How about Marx’ “Das Kapital” which was the main trigger for communistic movements all over the world? And most recently, how about the thousand different ways of reading the “Quran” in the Muslim religion?

Literary texts may be produced by an author who wants to express a special thought, and we are taught in school always to ask: “What wanted the author to tell us? How shall we read this piece of work?” But we often neglect that multiple ways of reading a text exist. Any piece of writing is created as innocent as a newborn child, even though an author might have had an intention while writing it. It is more important which conclusions every single reader draws from the words. Depending on one’s own beliefs and experiences everybody reads a text under different focuses: The one observes social criticism in face of gender studies, the other sees psychoanalytical aspects of the human mind and so on.

One single literary work can influence a person’s mind either in a very positive or negative way, but we mustn’t forget about achieving multiple ways of thinking about one single text. It only ought to be the fundament of discussion, and we need to be receptive for other points of view as well. Especially reading scientific secondary literature about a primary text can help forming a final opinion based on close observation. Radical lecture of texts has led to negative results, as it was proven in history too often.

We don’t have to assume other attitudes of the same text – but we at least need to accept them as having the same value than our own.

Thank you for reading and see you!~

Junsui