Lit and Civ II Sp15

“What Is Literature?”

from Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983)

There have been various attempts to define literature.  You can define, for example, as ‘imaginative’ writing in the sense of fiction—writing which is not necessarily true

[But] a distinction between ‘fact’ and fiction,’ then, seems unlikely to get us very far.

 Novels and news reports are neither clearly factual nor clearly fictional: our own sharp distinctions between these categories simply do not apply.

Superman comics are fictional but not generally regarded as literature, and certainly not as Literature.

Perhaps one needs a different kind of approach altogether.  Perhaps literature is definable not according to whether it is fictional or imaginative, but because it uses language in peculiar ways.

Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language . . . If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur, “Thou still unravished bride of quietness,” then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary.

Literary discourse estranges and alienates ordinary speech, but in doing so, paradoxically, brings us into a fuller, more intimate possession of experience.

The idea that there is a single “normal” language, a common currency shared equally by all members of society is an illusion.  Any actual language consists of a highly complex range of discourses, differentiated according to class, region, gender, status, and so on.

The context [of reading] tells me that it is literary, but the language itself has no inherent properties or qualities which might distinguish it from other kinds of discourse.

This focusing on the way of talking, rather than on the reality of what is talked about, is sometimes taken to indicate that we mean by literature a kind of self-referential language, a language which talks about itself [draws attention to itself].

In this sense, once can think of literature less as some inherent quality or set of qualities displayed by certain kinds of writing all the way from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf, than as a number of ways in which people relate themselves to writing.

There is no essence of literature whatsoever.

Perhaps literature means . . . any kind of writing which for some reason or another somebody values highly.

Literature is in this sense a purely formal, empty sort of definition.

The suggestion that literature is a highly valued kind of writing is an illuminating one.  But it has one fairly devastating consequence.  It means that we can drop once and for all the illusion that the category “literature” is objective, in the sense of being eternally given and immutable.  Anything can be literature, and anything which is regarded as unalterably and unquestionably literature—Shakespeare, for example—can cease to be literature.

The reason why it follows from the definition of literature s highly valued writing that it is not a stable entity is that value-judgments are notoriously variable.

The so-called “literary canon,” the unquestioned “great tradition” of the “national literature,” has to be recognized as a construct, fashioned by particular people for particular reasons at a certain time.

Value is a transitive term: it means whatever is valued by a certain people in specific situations, according to particular criteria and in light of given purposes.  It is thus quite possible that, given a deep transformation in our history, we may in the future produce a society which is unable to get anything at all out of Shakespeare . . . In such a situation Shakespeare would be no more valuable than much present-day graffiti.

We always interpret literary works to some extent in the light of our own concerns.

Different historical periods have constructed a “different” Homer and Shakespeare for their own purposes, and found in these texts elements to value or devalue, though not necessarily the same ones.  All literary works, in other words, are “rewritten,” if only unconsciously, by the societies which read them” indeed there is no reading of a work that is not also a “re-writing.”

What we have uncovered so far, then, is not only that literature does not exist in the sense that insects do, and that the value-judgments by which it is constituted are historically variable, but also that these value-judgments have themselves close relation to social ideologies.