The goal of Lesson 1 is to make you confident in knowing what literature is and, as an extension of that, how to recognize a literary text in the Bible when you read one. This is the subject of chapter 1 of How to Read the Bible as Literature. Read pages 11-32 in this book.
Optional Learning by Doing Exercise
A good text with which to apply what you have learned in this lesson is the account of King Hezekiah’s sickness and recovery as narrated in Isaiah 38:1-20. The overall question for which you need to supply answers is how you know that this is a literary text. Do not overlook the obvious: the first tipoff that a text is literary is that it belongs to one or more literary genres.