DEFINING
LITERATURE
Conventional definitions
• Literature as anything written,
records human experience,
expresses emotions, feelings and
ideals.
• Literature as writing that exhibits
excellence of form or expression.
• Literature as writing of permanent or
universal interest.
ALTERNATIVE DEFINITION OF
LITERATURE
• Literature as imaginative writing
• Literary language
• Organizes, tightens, the resources of
everyday language, sometimes does
violence to them in an effort to force us into
awareness and attention
• Literary language calls attention to itself
Working Definition of Literature
• Literature shall mean a work of
fiction characterized by a self-
conscious use of language which is
highly connotative in nature.
Literature
• … we can asforaallfluid
drop once and concept
the illusion that 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. Any belief that the study of
literature is the study of a stable, well-definable entity, as
entomology is the study of insects, can be abandoned as
a chimera. Some kind of fiction are literature and some
are not; some literature is fictional and some are not;
some literature is verbally self-regarding, while some
highly-wrought rhetoric is not literature. Literature, in
the sense of a set of works of assured and
unalterable value, distinguished by certain shared
inherent properties, does not exist (Eagleton, 1983).
FUNCTIONS OF LITERATURE
• Literature as a form of pleasure
• Literature as a form of engagement
Literature as a form of Pleasure
• Provide a form of escape
• To provide aesthetic satisfaction
Literature as a form of engagement
• To provide a way of interpreting the
world
• To provide a way of transforming the
world
LITERARY THEORY VS
LITERARY CRITICISM
Literary Theory
• The set of ideas and abstract principles
that relate to a particular subject or to a
particular view of that subject.
• The set of ideas and principles that
regulate both the writing and the study
of literature
Fundamental Elements of a Work
of Art
• The Work – the artistic production itself which may
be a poem, a novel, a short story, a piece of
dramatic writing
• The Artist – the producer of the work, the person
who wrote or composed the work
• The Universe – the subject of the work, which may
consist of “people and actions, ideas and feelings,
material things and events, or super-sensible
essences”
• The Audience – the readers for whom the work is
intended or those who may have access to the work.
Literary Criticism
• Literary criticism is an attempt to clarify,
explain, and evaluate our experience with a
given literary work.
• It allows us to form some judgments about the
relative merit or quality of the work as a
whole.
• Criticism is the act of reflecting on, organizing,
and then articulating on a given literary work.
Assumptions in the study of
• Literary criticismliterature:
presupposes that a work of
literary art contains certain significant
relationships and patterns of meaning that the
reader-critic can recover and share.
• Literary criticism presupposes the ability of the
reader-turned-critic to translate his experience
of the work into intellectual terms that can be
communicated to and understood by others.
• Literary criticism presupposes that the critic’s
experience of the work, once organized and
articulated, will generally compatible with the
experience of other readers.
