This study is designed to explore how literature lessons are perceived by pre-service English language teaching (ELT) students and discusses the findings in terms of student perceptions and educational objectives. The participants were 30 Turkish EFL senior students. Both quantitative and qualitative measures were used to collect data in order to validate the findings. The results showed that pre-service teachers highly valued the literature courses. The participants, however, recommended that the literature courses should not be restricted to the canonic texts and aim to develop linguistic abilities through critical literary readings and cultural interpretative efforts.