Learning Language through Literature:

A Study of Maugham’s “The Luncheon” and Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

Abstract

This study shows how literature can be used as a tool to develop learners’ knowledge in English. Most of the courses in the Departments of English in Bangladesh are literature-oriented and the teaching and testing systems mainly cover some thematic and philosophical aspects. This paper aims at exploring the effectiveness of learning language through literature, locating the different distinctive linguistic features tightly patterned in a literary text. As literature does not constitute a particular type of language, the effects of literary language and the real life use of it in texts allow the language learners to trace how different linguistic rules are embedded in, and how the learners can develop language skills, unveiling the inseparable bridge between language and literature. This paper, therefore, is a linguistic experimentation on Maugham’s “The Luncheon” and Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to demonstrate how they can be used as teaching materials to enrich students’ communicative and linguistic competence in English. This study also focuses on practical uses of some figurative languages such as dramatic monologue, humor, irony, metaphor, paradox, satire, and symbol as well as some idioms and phrases which may help the learners gain a lot of exposure in English.