What is Literature?

Terry Eagleton
 “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.

First
Definition
But even the briefest reflection on what people
commonly include under the heading of literature
suggests that this will not do… 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.”
 • 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,
Second in the words of the Russian critic Roman
Jakobson, represents an 'organized violence
Definition committed on ordinary speech’. Literature
transforms and intensifies ordinary language,
deviates systematically from everyday speech.
Russian Formalism
• The Russian Formalists of the early years of the twentieth
century stressed that critics should concern themselves with
the literariness of literature: the verbal strategies that make it
literary, the foregrounding of language itself, and the ‘making
strange’ of experience that they accomplish. Redirecting
attention from authors to verbal ‘devices’, they claimed that
‘the device is the only hero of literature’. Roman Jakobson,
Boris Eichenbaum, and Victor Shklovsky are three key figures
in this group which reoriented literary study towards
questions of form and technique.
• The credo of the early Russian Formalists was an extreme
one: they believed that the human emotions and ideas
expressed in a work of literature were of secondary concern
and provided the context only for the implementation of
literary devices.
Terms and Definitions
• Devices - included sound, imagery, rhythm, syntax,
meter, 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’
• Defamiliarization - A concept employed by Russian
formalists, defamiliarization signifies the attribute of
some kinds of writing or other works of art which
communicates in non-transparent ways that make the
world seem strange. The point of defamiliarization is
that it shakes up reading and writing habits, undercuts
conventional propriety in language and literature, and
thus prevents the reader from making merely habitual
or conventional responses.
Literary discourse On the one hand, there are occasions when a
[for the Formalists] language/text with 'no inherent properties or
estranges or qualities which might distinguish it from other kinds
alienates ordinary of discourse' can be considered as literature. On the
speech, but in other, not all ‘verbally flamboyant’ texts bear
doing so, literariness (paraphrased).
paradoxically,
brings us into a
fuller, more intimate Another problem with the
possession of 'estrangement/defamiliarization' case is that there
experience… [They] is no kind of writing which cannot, given sufficient
presumed that ingenuity, be read as estranging. (Examples: In your
‘making strange’ own words; no private reading; more than happy
was the essence of to do that—they display ambiguities, thus can be
the literary. read as estranging. Does that mean that we can
consider these examples as literature?).
The Formalists saw literary language as But to spot a deviation implies being
a set of deviations from a norm, a kind able to identify the norm from which it
of linguistic violence: literature is a swerves… The idea that there is a single
'special' kind of language, in contrast to 'normal' language, a common currency
the 'ordinary' language we commonly shared equally by all members of
use. society, is an illusion… One person's
norm may be another's deviation...
 Literature, then, we might say, is 'non-
pragmatic' discourse: it serves no
immediate practical purpose, but is to be
taken as referring to a general state of
affairs… This focusing on the way of
Third talking, rather than on the reality of what
Definition 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.
• There are, however, problems with this way of defining literature too... In
much that is classified as literature, the truth-value and practical relevance
of what is said is considered important to the overall effect.

• 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 may be read 'poetically'.

• But even if treating discourse 'nonpragmatically’ is part of what is meant by

'literature', then it follows from this 'definition' that literature cannot in
fact 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 in this way.
 • Those that are classified as
Fourth literature displays 'fine writing’.

Definition • An obvious objection to this is

that if it were entirely true there
would be no such thing as 'bad
literature'.
 John M. Ellis 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
Fifth like the opposite: any kind of writing which for
some reason or another somebody values
Definition highly. As the philosophers might say,
'literature' and ‘weed’ are functional rather
than ontological terms: they tell us about what
we do, not about the fixed being of
things…'Literature' is in this sense a purely
formal, empty sort of definition.
 • One 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.

• Anything can be literature, and anything which

Sixth is regarded as unalterably and unquestionably
literature - Shakespeare, for example - can
cease to be literature. Any belief that the study
Definition 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
kinds of fiction are literature and some are not;
some literature is fictional and some is 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.
 Value-judgements
• an assessment of something as good or bad in
terms of one's standards or priorities.

• 'Value' is a transitive term: it means whatever is

valued by certain people in specific situations,
according to particular criteria and in the light of
given purposes.

• All of our descriptive statements move within an

often invisible network of value-categories, and
indeed without such categories we would have
nothing to say to each other at all.
 By 'ideology' I mean, roughly, the ways in which what we say and
believe connects with the power-structure and power-relations of
the society we live in… I do not mean by 'ideology’ simply the
deeply entrenched, often unconscious beliefs which people hold;
I mean more particularly those modes of feeling, valuing,
perceiving and believing which have some kind of relation to the
maintenance and reproduction of social power. –Terry Eagleton

Broadly defined, a system of cultural assumptions, or

the discursive concatenation of beliefs or values which
IDEOLOGY uphold or oppose social order, or which otherwise
provide a coherent structure of thought that hides or
silences the contradictory elements in social and
economic formations.
Ideology is not simply a 'false consciousness', an illusory representation of
reality, it is rather this reality itself which is already to be conceived as
'ideological' - 'ideological' is a social reality whose very existence implies
the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence - that is, the social
effectivity, the very reproduction of which implies that the individuals 'do
not know what they are doing'. 'Ideological' is not the ‘false
consciousness' of a (social) being but this being itself in so far as it is
supported by false ‘consciousness’. –Slavoj Zizek
 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-judgements by which it
is constituted are historically variable,
but that these value-judgements
themselves have a close relation to
social ideologies. They refer in the
end not simply to private taste, but to
the assumptions by which certain
social groups exercise and maintain
power over others.
TO THE QUESTION THE AUTHOR, TERRY THE TERM LITERATURE IS
"WHAT IS EAGLETON, 'LITERATURE' BOTH/NEITHER AN
SUMMARIZ LITERATURE?“ ASKS
NOT FOR A
EXAMINED SEVERAL
DIFFERENT WAYS OF
OPERATES RATHER
LIKE THE WORD
OBJECTIVE OR/NOR A
SUBJECTIVE MATTER,

E, WE DEFINITION BUT FOR

AN ANALYSIS, THUS IT
BREEDS OTHER
DEFINING
LITERATURE. HE
POINTED OUT
'WEED'. IT IS IN THIS
SENSE A PURELY
FORMAL, EMPTY
IT IS CONSTITUTED BY
VALUE-JUDGEMENTS
WHICH ARE DEEPLY

HAVE QUESTIONS SUCH AS:

WHAT SORT OF
OBJECT OR ACTIVITY
REASONS FOR EACH
DEFINITION TO BE
WELL-FOUNDED BUT
SORT OF DEFINITION. ROOTED IN SOCIAL
IDEOLOGIES.

LEARNED IS IT? WHAT DOES IT

DO? WHAT PURPOSE
ALSO HIGHLIGHTED
THEIR WEAKNESSES
DOES IT SERVE? TO THROUGH
THAT: WHAT DO WE BASE
OUR DEFINITION OF
DIALECTICAL
REASONING.
IT? WHAT IS
INVOLVED IN
TREATING THINGS AS
LITERATURE IN OUR
CULTURE? AND SO
ON.