What is Literature?

Class 2
Geetha Bakilapadavu
• A form of human expression
• Inspired writing
• Creative expression through writings
• ‘writings having excellence of form or expression and expressing ideas
of permanent or universal interest’
• ‘the matter of imaginative or artistic literature… not of mere fact, but
of fact in its infinitely varied forms’ (Walter Pater)
• ‘artistic’ having ‘ aesthetic value’
• ‘art of playing on the minds of others’: Paul Valery
• Denotes and captures our aspirations, values, illusions, ethos,
orthodoxies, vulnerabilities, vagaries
• A means to escape
• To transgress, to defy
• Intriguing, complex and simple at various levels
•Form in connection with ideas of universal interest are
characteristic features of literature
•Form and feeling
• Language in literature is a wrapper and a gift
• Different forms of literature:
• Poetry, short fiction, novella, novel, drama, literary essays and so on
• ‘aesthetic’: being balanced, serene, powerful, delicate, graceful,
nuanced, subtle, beautiful- a distinct quality of beauty that gives a joy
to the beholder
What does literature do?
• Imitate, express, escape, affect, project life or mirror life or …?
• How do we experience a literary work:

• In the form and in what is in it

• The language as a medium or a vehicle to express
• Inner world of the characters
• Depths of emotional complexity
• The Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky’s concept of
“Defamiliarization”:
• refers to the literary device whereby language is used in such a way that
ordinary and familiar objects are made to look different
• a process of transformation where language asserts its power to affect our
perception
• It differentiates between ordinary usage and poetic usage of language
suggesting the uniqueness of a literary work
Organic unity
• A structural principle, first mentioned by Plato and then discussed by
Aristotle
• Requires internally consistent thematic and dramatic development
• Aristotle sees it similar to the biological growth
• According to his Poetics, the action of a narrative or drama must be
presented as “a complete whole, with its several incidents so closely
connected that the transposal or withdrawal of any one of them will
disjoin and dislocate the whole” (Aristotle)
• ‘cut a good story anywhere, and it will bleed.’ ( Chekhov)
• Chekhov’s gun idea
• What is art?
• What is narrative arts?
• What comes to your mind when you think of a ‘narrative’?
• Give a few examples….
• When did you first engage in telling narratives?
• ‘Vague glimpses of life’s possibilities’: Richard Wright
• ‘at best’, art can be nothing more than a means of forgetting the human disaster for
a while …Fiction has the magical power of merging causality with purpose, doubt
with faith, the passions of the flesh with the yearnings of the soul’ (Issac Bashevis
Singer)
• ‘The single most powerful influence on my way of writing is the question why a
man cannot simply walk away and say to hell with it. Answering this question is
more important than depicting why a man does what he does or why he nearly
didn’t do it”: Arthur Miller
• “… There are too many things that divide people, such as religion,
politics, history and nationalism … Feelings are what link people
together, because the word ‘love’ has the same meaning for everybody.
Or ‘fear’, or ‘suffering’ … we all fear the same way. That’s why I tell
about these things, because in all other things I immediately find
division”- Keislowski
What is a Narrative?
“narrative refer[s] to the narrative statement, the oral or written discourse that
undertakes to tell of an event or series of events . . . .” In contrast, the story is “the
succession of events, real or fictitious, that are the subjects of this discourse”
(Genette 25). “narrative [is] the signifier, statement, discourse or narrative text
itself”; “story [is] the signified narrative content”; “narrating [is] the producing
narrative action; the event that consists of someone recounting something”
(Genette 26-27).
The narratives of the world are numberless. Narrative is first and foremost a
prodigious variety of genres, themselves distributed amongst different substances -
as though any material were fit to receive man's stories. Able to be carried by
articulated language, spoken or written, fixed or moving images, gestures, and the
ordered mixture of all these substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fable,
tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting, stained-glass
windows, cinema, comics, news items, conversation. Moreover, under this almost
infinite diversity of forms, narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every
society; it begins with the very history of mankind and there nowhere is nor has
been a people without narrative. AII classes, all human groups, have their
narratives, enjoyment of which is very often shared by men with different, even
opposing, cultural backgrounds. Caring nothing for the division between good and
bad literature, narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply
there, like life itself (Roland Barthes)
A narrative is…

• “the representation of an event or a series of events”

• “the representation of an event or a series of events causally related”
• Story and narration : narration is the telling of story( narrative
discourse)
• narrative discourse
• story

Is narrative an event or sequence of events (the action) as represented?

fabula and sjuzet

• Used by the Russian Formalists,

• Fabula refers to the chronological sequence of events in a
narrative (story)- all-revealing
• Sjuzhet is the representation of those events (through
narration, metaphor, camera angles, the re-ordering of the
temporal sequence etc.)
On story telling
• Story telling: ‘imaginative imposition of form on life’
• A narrative offers ‘a model for understanding events that unfold
temporally’
• Plot and plotting - the design and intention of narrative, shapes a story
and gives it a certain direction or intent of meaning
• “…the temporal dynamics that shape narratives in our reading of
them, the play of desire in time that makes us turn pages and strive
toward narrative ends… the motor forces that drive the text forward,
of the desires that connect narrative ends and beginnings, and make of
the textual middle a highly charged field of force”
Peter Brooks
Henry James:
• life is a splendid waste “all inconclusion and confusion” as compared
to life embedded in narrative art is splendid economy “all
discrimination and selection”
• It is ‘a fine focusing of life’
Narrative time
• Relates to events – to action
• Fluidity of narrative time: one could extend narrative time ( by
slowing down the narrative, by giving details) or contract time
• ‘Narrating ( reading) time’ and ‘plot time’ : what is the distinction?
• ‘narrated time’ denotes the time span of a story, ‘narrating time’
determines the ‘physical time’ a “narrator needs to tell the
story” (Muller, 1947)
Narrative time
• Relates to events – to action
• Fluidity of narrative time: one could extend narrative time ( by
slowing down the narrative, by giving details) or contract time
• ‘Narrating ( reading) time’ and ‘plot time’ : what is the distinction?
• ‘narrated time’ denotes the time span of a story, ‘narrating time’
determines the ‘physical time’ a “narrator needs to tell the
story” (Muller, 1947)
• narrating time~ reel time
• ‘narrated time’: time within which the action happened - plot time
• “three main sorts of narrative time contractions”:
• the explicit or implicit “skipping of time spans” (e.g. ‘a few years later’)
• the contraction of time in large steps or main achievements
• the “iterative or durative traits” (e.g. ‘He rode out daily’) ( Muller, 1947)
• Genette draws upon other scholars of narratology and employs
the categories of ‘order,’ ‘duration,’ and ‘frequency’ with respect
to time
Note what is happening to the narrative time in this:
It was a Sunday morning in the very height of spring. Georg
Bendemann, a young merchant, was sitting in his own room on
the first floor of one of a long row of small, ramshackle houses
stretching beside the river which were scarcely distinguishable
from each other in height and coloring. He had just finished a
letter to an old friend of his who was now living abroad, had put
it into its envelope in a slow and dreamy fashion, and with his
elbows propped on the writing table was gazing out of the
window at the river, the bridge, and the hills on the farther bank
with their tender green.
Thank you.