ABSTRACT
A conception of literature in education founded on creative principles would put the notion of encounter at the centre of the enterprise. In the making of literature the artist encounters the world of experience, or significant aspects of that world. Out of that encounter literary works construe a sense of reality. The making of the work shapes, and in shaping discovers, what that reality might be through its symbolic presentation. Interpenetrating and mediating all of these dimensions of the literary encounter there is language itself, the art medium. Language, in literary writing, becomes the agent of discovery. A programme of literature in education would, therefore, concentrate upon artistic making as a prime experience for its students. The advantage of literature is that through its processes of making, the aesthetic mode of apprehending reality attends to evidences of experience which are not bound to the exclusively intellectual, not to discursive forms of representing that reality.
