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Introduction: What is Literature?

What is Literature?

If there is such a thing as literary theory, then it would seem obvious that there is something called
literature which it is the theory of. We can begin, then, by raising the question: what is literature?
There have been various attempts to define literature. You can define it, for example, as 'imaginative'
writing in the sense of fiction – writing which is not literally true. But even the briefest reflection on what people
commonly include under the heading of literature suggests that this will not do. Seventeenth century English
literature includes Shakespeare, Webster, Marvell and Milton; but it also stretches to the essays of Francis
Bacon, the sermons of John Donne, Bunyan's spiritual autobiography and whatever it was that Sir Thomas
Browne wrote. It might even at a pinch be taken to encompass Hobbes’s Leviathan or Clanderon’s History of
the Rebellion. French seventeenth-century literature contains, along with Corneille and Racine, La
Rochefoucauld’s maxims. Bossuet’s funeral speeches, Boileau’s treatise o poetry, Madame de Sévigné’s letters
to her daughter and the philosophy of Descartes and Pascal. Nineteenth-century English literature usually
includes Lamb (though not Bentham), Maculay (but not Marx), Mill (but not Darwin or Herbert Spencer).
A distinction between 'fact' and 'fiction', then, seems unlikely to get us very far, not least because the
distinction itself is often a questionable one. It has been argued, for instance, that our own opposition between
‘historical’ and ‘artistic’ truth does not apply at all to the early Icelandic sagas. In the English late sixteenth and
early seventeenth centuries, the word 'novel' seems to have been used about both true and fictional events, and
even news reports were hardly considered factual. Novels and news reports were neither clearly factual nor
clearly fictional: our own sharp discriminations between these categories simply did not apply. Gibbon no doubt
thought that he was writing the historical truth, and so perhaps did the authors of Genesis, but they are now
read as ‘fact’ by some and ‘fiction’ by others; Newman certainly thought his theological meditations were true
but they are now for many readers ‘literature’. Moreover, if ‘literature’ includes much ‘factual’ writing, it also
excludes quite a lot of fiction. Superman comic and Mills and Boon novels are fictional but not generally
regarded as literature, and certainly not as Literature. If literature is ‘creative’ or ‘imaginative’ writing, does this
imply that history, philosophy and natural science are uncreative and unimaginative?
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. On this
theory, literature is a kind of writing which, in the words of the Russian critic Roman Jakobson, represents an
'organised violence committed on ordinary speech'. Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language,
deviates systematically from everyday speech. 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. I know this
because the texture, rhythm and resonance of your words are in excess of their abstractable meaning – or, as
the linguists might more technically put it, there is a disproportion between the signifiers and the signifieds. Your
language draws attention to itself, flaunts its material being, as statements like 'Don't you know the drivers are
on strike?' do not.
The Formalists started out by seeing the literary work as a more or less arbitrary assemblage of
'devices' and only later came to see these devices as interrelated elements or 'functions' within a total textual
system. 'Devices' included sound, imagery, rhythm, syntax, metre, rhyme, narrative techniques, in fact the
whole stock of formal literary elements; and what all of these elements had in common was their 'estranging' or
'defamiliarizing' effect. What was specific to literary language, what distinguished it from other forms of
discourse, was that it 'deformed' ordinary language in various ways. Under the pressure of literary devices,
ordinary language was intensified, condensed, twisted, drawn out, turned on its head. It was language 'made
strange'; and because of this estrangement, the everyday world was also suddenly made unfamiliar. In the
routines of everyday speech, our perceptions of and responses to reality become stale, blunted or automated.
Literature, by forcing us into a dramatic awareness of language, refreshes these habitual responses and
renders objects more 'perceptible'. By having to grapple with language in a more strenuous, self-conscious way
than usual, the world described by that language is vividly renewed. Literary discourse estranges or alienates
ordinary speech, but in doing so, paradoxically, brings us into a fuller, more intimate possession of experience.
We read a scribbled note from a friend without paying much attention to its narrative structure; but if a
story breaks off and begins again, switches constantly from one narrative level to another and delays its climax
to keep us in suspense, we become freshly conscious of how it is constructed at the same time as our
engagement with it may be intensified.
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The Formalists then, saw literary language as a set of deviations from the norm, a kind of linguistic
violence: literature is a 'special' kind of language, in contrast to the 'ordinary' language we commonly use. But to
spot a deviation implies being able to identify the norm from which it deviates. Though 'ordinary language' is a
concept beloved of some Oxford philosophers, the ordinary language of Oxford philosophers has little in
common with the ordinary language of Glaswegian dockers. The language both social groups use to write love
letters usually differs from the way they talk to the local vicar. The idea that there is a single 'normal' language,
a common currency shared equally by all members of a society, is an illusion. One person's norm may be
another person's deviation.

It is not that the Russian Formalists did not realize all this. They recognised that norms and deviations
shift around from one social or historical context to another. The fact that a piece of language was 'estranging'
did not mean that it was always and everywhere so: it was estranging only against a certain normative linguistic
background. If everyone used language like 'Thou unravished bride of quietness' in ordinary pub conversation,
then kind of language might cease to be poetic. They were not out to define 'literature' but 'literariness' – special
uses of language which could be found in 'literary' texts but also in many places outside them. Anyone who
believes that 'literature' can be defined by such special uses of language has to face the fact that there is more
metaphor in Manchester than in Marvell. There is no 'literary' device – metonymy, synecdoche, litotes,
chiasmus and so on – which is not quite intensively used in daily discourse.
What if I were to hear someone at the next pub table remark 'This is awfully squiggly handwriting!' Is
this 'literary' or 'non-literary' language? As a matter of fact it is 'literary' language because it comes from Knut
Hamsuns' novel Hunger. But how do I know that it is literary? It doesn't after all focus any particular attention on
itself as a verbal performance. One answer to the question of how I know that this is literary is that it comes
form Knut Hamsun's novel Hunger. It is part of a text which I read as 'fictional', which announces itself as a
novel. The context 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, and someone might well say this in a pub without being
admired for their literary skills. To think of literature as the Formalists do is really to think of all literature as
poetry. But literature is usually judged to contain much besides poetry – to include realist or naturalistic writing
which is not linguistically self-conscious or self-exhibiting in a striking way. Indeed, people sometimes call
writing 'fine' because it doesn't draw attention to itself: they admire its plainness and low-keyed sobriety. And
what about jokes, football chants and slogans, newspaper headlines, advertisements, which are often verbally
flamboyant but not generally classified as literature?
Another problem with the 'estrangement' case is that there is no kind of writing which cannot, given
sufficient ingenuity, be read as estranging. Consider a prosaic, quite unambiguous statement like the one
sometimes seen in the London underground system: 'Dogs must be carried on the escalator.' This is not
perhaps quite as unambiguous as it seems at first sight. Does it mean that you must carry a dog on the
escalator? Are you likely to be banned from the escalator unless you can find some stray mongrel to clutch in
your arms on the way up? Many apparently straightforward notices contain such ambiguities: 'Refuse to be put
in the basket,' for instance. It is surely obvious that the underground notice could be read as literature. This has
the advantage of suggesting that 'literature' may be at least as much a question of what people do to writing as
of what writing does to them. But even if someone were to read the notice in this way, it would still be a matter
of reading it as poetry, which is only part of what is usually included in literature.
Let us consider another way of misreading the sign about dogs. Imagine a late-night drunk doubled
over the escalator handrail who reads the notice with laborious attentiveness for several minutes and then
mutters 'How true!' What kind of mistake is occurring here? What the drunk is doing, in fact, is taking the sign as
some statement of general, even cosmic, significance. By applying certain conventions of reading to its words,
he prises them loose from their immediate context and generalises them beyond their pragmatic purpose to
something of wider and probably deeper significance. This non-pragmatic way of reading would certainly seem
to be one operation involved in what people call literature. When a poet tells us that his love is like a red rose,
we know by the very fact that he puts this statement in metre that we are not supposed to ask if he actually had
a lover who, for some bizarre reason, seemed to him to resemble a rose. He is telling us something about
women and love in general.
Literature, then, we might say is 'non-pragmatic' discourse: unlike biology textbooks or railway
timetables it serves no immediate practical purpose, but is to be taken as referring to a general state of affairs.
Sometimes, though not always, it may employ peculiar language as though to make this fact obvious – to signal
that what is at stake is a way of talking about a woman, rather than any particular real-life woman. 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.
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There are, however, problems with this way of defining literature. In much that is classified as literature,
the truth-value and practical relevance of what is said is considered important to the overall effect. But even if
treating discourse 'non-pragmatically' is part of what is meant by 'literature', then it follows from this definition
that literature can not be 'objectively' defined. It leaves the definition of literature up to how somebody decides
to read, not to the nature of what is written. There are certain kinds of writing – poems, plays, novels – which
are fairly obviously intended to be 'non-pragmatic in this sense but this does not guarantee that they will actually
be read this way. A piece of writing may start off life as history or philosophy and then come to be ranked as
literature; or it may start off as literature and then come to be valued for its archaeological significance.
In this sense, one can think of literature less as some inherent quality or set of qualities displayed by
certain kinds of writing, than as a number of ways in which people relate themselves to writing. It would not be
easy to isolate, from all that has been variously called 'literature' some constant set of inherent features. There
is no 'essence' of literature whatsoever. Any bit of writing may be read 'non-pragmatically' if that is what reading
a text as literature means, just as any writing can be read 'poetically'. If I study the railway timetable not to
discover a train connection but to stimulate in myself reflections on the speed and complexity of modern
existence, then I might be said to be reading it as literature. John M. Ellis (Theory of Literary Criticism, 1974)
has argued that the term 'literature' operates rather like the word 'weed': weeds are not particular kinds of plant,
but just any kind of plant which for some reason or another a gardener does not want around. Perhaps literature
means something like the opposite: any kind of writing which for some reason is highly-valued by somebody.
However, this is a purely formal, empty sort of definition. Even if we claim that it is a non-pragmatic
treatment of language, we have still not arrived at an 'essence' of literature because this is also true of other
linguistic practices such as jokes. In any case, it is far from clear that we can discriminate neatly between
'practical' and 'non-practical' ways of relating ourselves to language. Reading a novel for pleasure obviously
differs from reading a road sign for information, but how about reading a biology textbook to improve your mind?
Is that a 'pragmatic' treatment of language or not? In many societies, 'literature' has served highly practical
functions such as religious ones; distinguishing sharply between 'practical' and 'non-practical' may only be
possible in a society like ours where literature has ceased to have much practical function at all. We may be
offering as a general definition a sense of the 'literary' which is in fact historically and geographically specific.
It can be suggested that by and large people term 'literature' writing that they think is good. Value-
judgements would certainly seem to have a lot to do with what is judged literature and what isn't – not
necessarily in the sense that writing has to be 'fine' to be literary, but that it has to be of the kind that is judged
fine: it may be an inferior example of a generally valued mode. Nobody would bother to say that a bus ticket
was an example of inferior literature, but someone might well say that the poetry of Ernest Dowson was. The
term 'fine writing' or 'belles lettres' is in this sense ambiguous: it denotes a sort of writing which is generally
highly regarded, while not necessarily committing you to the opinion that a particular specimen of it is 'good'.
With this reservation, 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 eternal and immutable. Anything can be
literature, and anything which is regarded as unalterably and unquestionably literature – Shakespeare, for
example – can cease to be literature. Literature in the sense of a set of works of assured value, distinguished
by certain shared inherent properties, does not exist. When I use the words 'literary' and 'literature' from here
on, then, I place them under an invisible crossing-out mark, to indicate that these terms will not really do but that
we have no better ones at the moment.
The reason why it follows from the definition of literature as highly-valued writing that it is not a stable
entity is that value-judgements are notoriously variable. 'Times change, values don't' announces an
advertisement for a daily newspaper, as if we still believed in killing of infirm infants or putting the mentally ill on
public show. Just as people may treat a work as philosophy in one century and literature in the next, or vice
versa, so they may change their minds about what writing they consider valuable. They may even change their
minds about the grounds they use for judging what is valuable and what is not. There is not such thing as a
literary work or tradition which is valuable in itself, regardless of what anyone might have said or come to say
about it. 'Value' is a transitive term; it means whatever is valued by certain people in specific situations. It is thus
quite possible that, given a deep enough transformation of our history, we may in the future produce a society
which is unable to get anything at all out of Shakespeare.
The fact that we always interpret literary works to some extent in the light of our own concerns might be
one reason why certain works of literature seem to retain their value across the centuries. It may be, of course,
that we still share many preoccupations with the work itself; but it may also be that people have not actually
been valuing the 'same' work at all, even though they may think they have. 'Our' Homer is not identical with the
Homer of the Middle Ages, nor 'our' Shakespeare with that of his contemporaries; it is rather that different
historical periods have constructed a 'different' Homer and Shakespeare for their own purposes, and found in
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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 which is not also a 're-writing'. No work, and no current evaluation of it, can simply be extended to new
groups of people without being changed, perhaps almost unrecognisably, in the process; and this is one reason
why what counts as literature is a notably unstable affair.

Eagleton, Terry. “Introduction: What is Literature?” Literary Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 1983.

* * * * * * * * * * *

What is Literature?
Alan Maley

The answer would seem to be self evident, yet the question gives rise to continuing debate.
Traditionally, Literature (with a large L) has tended to be thought of as the ‘best’ writing produced in a
given language or society, and this collection of ‘approved’ works has constituted the literary canon deemed by
authority to be fit for study. The syllabuses of many institutions still confine themselves to the Beowulf to Virginia
Woolf parade of great writers, with Shakespeare, the Metaphysical poets, Jane Austen, Dickens and the rest
featured prominently, and often safely excluding any writer who is not yet safely dead.
In the post-modern, deconstructionist age, however, the classical canon has been under attack as a
bastion of power and privilege. The definition of literature worthy of study has been widened to include feminist
and gay writing, genres such as detective fiction and horror, and most notably- the new literatures developing in
countries such as India and Singapore, where English has been grafted onto cultures and societies far removed
from the metropolis.
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A further enlargement of the field has taken place through the recognition of the widespread occurrence
of literary devices – such as parallelism, rhyme, rhythm and metaphor – in texts which were not even written as
literary texts such as advertising copy, graffiti and public notices.
The debate about what constitutes literature is relevant to the claims literature has on the language
classroom since it broadens the range of texts which may be considered for treatment. Classical texts are often
burdened with linguistic, historical and cultural baggage which come in the way of their usefulness as exemplars
of contemporary usage. Contemporary quasi-literary texts – such as advertising texts – come without this
baggage and are perceived as more immediately relevant by students.

Extracted from: The Cambridge Guide to Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages.
Edited by Ronald Carter and David Nunan. CUP. UK 2001.