On Literature & Awareness...

When we speak of awareness, what do we mean? The word itself means to be wary, to be awake, to recognize what may easily be overlooked. It implies a state of heightened consciousness in which we respond to individual sights and sounds and more, more importantly, to the meanings of our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions, and our resolutions. In short, to be aware is to be alive to ourselves, to our personal being.
In literature awareness goes by other names. A writer is said to be aware when he or she responds to experience with understanding, imagination, sympathy. All these terms imply that the writer has seen vividly, has felt intensely, has recorded exactly memorable impressions, that, by virtue of his or her literary skill, come into our possession. Henry James summed up his advice to young writer in two principles. The first was: "Write from experience only." But then James hastened to add: "Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!" Thus the writer is one who benefits by experience; what he receives from life he or she gives to his readers. Awareness, then, is a combination of the power to receive from life and the power to communicate what one has received.
Perhaps the writer's greatest gift to us is his or her communication of his or her own creative power. He or she does this by inducing us to become, in a sense, cocreators of his or her own work. To know him or her, we must read his work warily, alert not only to the literal what of his or her language, but to its nuanced and modifying how. The writer's how is the particular form and convention in which he or she chooses to express him or herself...A vigilant reader re-creates what the author has written in the total sense of what and how.
The reader can advance to a higher degree of awareness, one that involves creative activity of his or her own. This activity is simply his or her response to a work of literature. True, one cannot talk back to a book as one can to a living person. Nevertheless, all literature is a kind of dialogue in which the reader takes an active part by questioning, interpreting, comparing, contrasting, and judging the author's work. Where the reader approves, he or she tends to expand and apply the insights of the writer to his or her own experience. Where the reader disapproves, he or she tends to develop the points of difference by proposing other points of view or opposite assumptions. Live literature provokes creative thinking, blessing, in Portia's phrase, him or her that takes as well as he or she that gives.
While all literature, whatever its theme, stimulates awareness, the literature centering on the theme of self-knowledge touches us to the quick; it comples us to look first at the experiences of others, then to discover and examine experiences of our own.

The Beginning of Awareness, from Man and His Measure, by Francis Connolly, 1964