i A Nery Sort Introduchior The Oxford University Press , S000 PBA PANE ia Caller, Jonatinan Chapter 2 What is Literature and Does it Matter? ‘What is literature? You'd think this would be a central question for literary theory, butin fact it has not seemed to matter very much. Why should this be? There appear to be two main reasons, First, since theory i intermingles ideas from philosophy, linguistics, history, poltical theory. and psychoanalysis, why should theorists worry about whether the texts they're reading are literary or not? For students and teachers of literature today there isa whole range of critical projects, topics to read and write about ~ such as “images of women in the early twentieth century’ - where you can deal with both literary and non-terary works. You can study Virginia Wooll's novels or Freud's case histories or both, and the distinction doesn’t seem methodologically crucial. I's not that all texts are somehow equal: some texts are taken to be richer, more powerful, more exemplary, more contestatory, more central, for one reason or another. But both literary and noniterary works can be studied together and in similar ways. Literariness outside literature inction has not seemed central because works of theory Iterary phenomena. Qualities often thought to be literary turn out to be crucial to non-lterary discourses and practices as wel. For instance, discussions of the nature of historical understanding have taken asa ‘model what is involved in understanding a story. Charactes historians do not produce explanations that are like the predictive ‘explanations of science: they cannot show that when X and ¥ occur, Z will necessarily happen. What they do, rather, isto show how one thing led to another, how the First World War come to break out, not why it had to happen. The mode! for historical explanation is thus the logic of stories: the way a story shows how something came to happen, connecting the initial situation, the development, and the outcome in a way that makes sense. aly, “The model for historical intelligibility, in short, is Iiterary narrative. We between them need not seem an urgent theorists have come to insist on the importance in non-lterary texts ~ nowlterary. But the factthat| describe this situation by speaking of the discovery of the literariness’ of nomliterary phenomena indicates thatthe notion of literature continues to play a role and needs to be addressed saan eg pus meneWhat sort of question? \We find ourselves back at the key question, ‘Whats literature?*, which «will not go away. But what sort of question isi? Ifa 5-year-oldis asking, it's easy. ‘Literature’, you answer, is stories, poems, and plays.’ But if the questioner isa literary theorist, i's harder to know how to take the query. tt might be a question about the general nature of this object, literature, which both of you already know well. What sort of object or activity is it? What does it do? What purposes does it serve? Thus understood, ‘What is literature?’ asks not for a definition but for an analysis, even an argument about why one might concern oneself with Ueerary Theory any essential, distinguishing features that Iterary works share? ‘This is a difficult question. Theorists have wrestled with it, bt without notable success. The reasons are not far to seek: works of literature come in all shapes and sizes and most of them seem to have more in ly called literature than they do Jr, for instance, more closely resembles an autobiography than it does ke a red, red rose" ~ resembles a foll-song more than it does Shakespeare's Hamlet. Are there qualities shared by poems, plays, and novels that distinguish them from, say, songs, transcriptions of conversations, and autobiographies? 2 Historical variations ven abit of historical perspective makes this question more complex. centuries old. Prior to 18 {European languages meant" a scientist who says ‘the liter that many poems and navel ‘written about it. And works that today are English or Latin classes in schools and universities were once treated not 1s special kind of writing but as fine examples ofthe use of language and rhetoric. They were instances ofa larger category of exemplary practices of writing ad thinking, which included speeches, sermons, history, and philosophy, Students were not asked to interpret them, as we naw Interpret literary works, seeking to explain what they are ‘really about’. On the contrary, students memorized them, studied their grammar, identified thelr rhetorical figures and their structures ‘or procedures of argument. A work such as Virgil's Aeneid, which today is studied as literature, was treated very differently in schools prior to 1850. ‘The modem Western sense of be traced to the German Rom: ature as imaginative writing can 1Bo0 by a French Baror in its Relations with Soc the last ewo centuries, the catego ‘would works which today count as snippets of ordinary conversation, without have qualified as literature think about non-European literature becomes increas is tempting to give it up and conclude that Iterature is whatever a given society treats a5 2 eTrather than ask ‘what is ‘some other society) treat her categories that work ‘What would it be? How do you recognize a weet that there isn'ta secret. Weeds are simply pla qualities that make plants weeds. You would have to carry out instead historical, sociological, perhaps psychological enquiries about the sorts ‘of plants that are judged undesirable by different groups in different places. Perhaps literature is like weed. {ut this answer doesn't eliminate the question it changes it to ‘what is Involved in treating things os literature in our culture?” Treating texts as li rature Suppose you come (05s the following sentence: ‘We dance round in 2 suppcse, But the Secret sits Inthe middle and knows. 2 ‘What is this, and how do you know? Well, it matters a good deal where you come across it.I this sentence Is printed om a slip in a Chinese fortune cookie, you may well tal ‘unusually enigmatical fortune, but when itis offered (as its here) as an example, you cast around for ies among uses of nguage {familiar to you. Ista riddle, asking us to guess the secret? Might it be an advertisement for something called ‘Secret’? Ads often rhyme ~ tastes good, lke a cigarette should’ - and they have grown increasinaly enigmatic in their attempts to jostle a jaded public. But this sentence seems detached from any readily imaginable practical stressed and unstressed syllabl reates the possibility that this might be poetry, an instance recipe, an advertisement, a newspaper, and sett down on a page in isolation: Stir vigorously and alow to sit five minutes. |s this literature? Have | made it literature by extracting it from the practical context of a recipe? Perhaps. but tis scarcely clear that | have. Something seems lacking; the sentence seems not to have the resources for you to work with. To make it literature you need, perhaps, to imagine a ttle whose relation to the line would pose a problem and exercise the imagination: for instance, “The Secret’, or The Quality of Mercy’. 2B usm wso0q pus semen 4M