What Is Literature? Essay

Because the 18th hundred years, the definition in the concept “literature” has become a difficult and a controversial concern among several literary colleges. What is materials? What are the qualities that distinguish a literary text from a non-literary 1? Does literature have any particular function in contemporary society? These are some crucial questions whose answers were meant to limit and define the scope of “literature”.

Nevertheless , various literary and critical schools have advanced different and contradictory responses to same concerns, which have as a result led to a failure in generating an authoritatively established meaning of “literature”. This kind of failure can be ascribed to numerous reasons, but because the entire paper doesn’t allow to tackle all of them, the forth-coming paragraphs will probably be devoted to talk about only two main reasons. The first explanation is the difficulty to distinguish between “fact” and “fiction” in a few works which usually, as it will be clarified in the few arriving paragraphs, were anthropological and documentary and were later on seen as imaginary, or the other way round.

The second reason resides in the several perspectives where different fictional theories include based their views regarding literature. This paper is usually, therefore , an effort to highlight the indeterminacy of the strategy “literature” simply by explaining and increasing on those two main reasons. In the first place, the concept of “literature”, originated from the Latin word “littera”, was introduced in to English inside the fourteenth century.

In its beginning, it was not really vague or indeterminate such as its modern use. It had been used after that to refer to “a current condition of reading: of being able to browse and of having read” (Williams, Marxism and Literature, 46). Hence, it had been used to have a meaning similar to that of “literacy”, which was gave and introduced into The english language in early nineteenth century if the concept “literature” was developed and got a different perception.

This new feeling, which was attributed to the progress printing, was “a specialty area? to the published word and especially the imprinted books with certain top quality [imaginative works]” (Williams, 46). To elaborate on this explanation, R. Wellek and A. Warren have stated that “in every one of them [the printed catalogs with certain quality], the reference is always to the world of fiction, of imagination” (Wellek and Warren, Theory of Literary works, 25). However , a simple report on the history of prose story forms would show that definition of literature as a category of fictional and imaginative articles is irrelevant.

Many writings which were created as anthropological documentaries had been making use of fictional works, while many different fictional works were given the status of documentary and factual articles. All travelogue writings and western historiography between the dark ages and the twentieth century are excellent examples to illustrate this time. Works like T. Elizabeth. Lawrence’s Several Pillars of Wisdom, W. M. Thackeray’s From Cornhill to Cairo, Kingslake’s Eothen, and Friend Thomas More’s Utopia utilized both reality and fictional. Moreover, in the time their appearance, most of these works had been conceived of by the traditional western audience because factual and documentary writings.

Later on, due to some traditional and politics changes in the world, these writings became conceptualized of while fictional and imaginary performs. Thus, defining literature on the grounds of fact vs fiction is usually questionable and invalid. Together with the development of critique in the West in the nineteenth 100 years, various tries, based on fresh ideas besides the distinction between truth and fictional, have been advanced by different approaches to be able to produce “accurate” definitions to “literature”. However , the contrary perspectives, where these endeavors have been structured, have made the project of defining “literature” more complicated; they have constituted a hindrance for the production of your authoritatively set up definition of “literature”.

In fact , inspite of all the differences and the specificities that distinguish each of these techniques, the meanings they have recommended can be grouped in two major types: the sociologically based definition and the linguistically based a single. The former, represented in this composition by the Marxist and the Postcolonial theories, provides related literary works to ideology. Both hypotheses have identified literature pertaining to the world beyond the literary text message, basing around the socio-cultural plus the historical situations.

The latter, showed here by simply Russian Formalism and New Criticism, have got believed in an overall total absence of ideological aspects in literature. In contrast to the 1st trend, Russian Formalists and New Experts have aimed at the “inside” of the fictional text instead of its “outside” in order to establish what “literature” is and what it is not. Both Russian Formalism and New Criticism have directed at providing a scientific and aim study of literature by analyzing their internal fictional and linguistic devices, including sound, symbolism, rhythm, format, meter, vocally mimic eachother, irony, paradoxon and ambivalence.

Russian Formalists, for instance, include claimed very much importance needs to be given to the literary kind and to the “literariness” from the literary text message, which differentiate it from other types of writing. Thus, the author as well as the socio-cultural contexts are not very important to them. Their definition of “literature” is for that reason based distinctively on contact form and terminology, which they get pregnant of while the unique companies of content and meaning of virtually any literary text message.

Moreover,? defamiliarization’, or the estrangement effect, may be the major characteristic that Russian Formalism ascribes to books. What makes the literary terminology specific and distinguishes that from other types of discourses is it is ability to “deform” the ordinary dialect. The use of the previously discussed literary gadgets renders the normal language “intensified, condensed, turned, telescoped, drawn out, turned on its head,? strange” (Eagleton, Literary Theory, “Introduction: What is Books? ” 04).

This estrangement, according to the Formalists, makes the everyday life unfamiliar plus more “perceptible”. To paraphrase Shkolvsky, a major Russian Formalist determine, literature is a tool to estrange someone from the familiar and the “automatized” everyday life, and also to refresh his ordinary encounters whose uniqueness and specificity have become invisible due to the program of normal experience and ordinary terminology (Williams, 89). Like Russian Formalism, New Criticism has rejected the world outside the fictional text and built upon the internal fictional devices to define materials.

New experts have conceptualized of the fictional work as an aesthetic object independent of historical and social situations. They have performed a close examining to the literary text, dealing with it as being a self-contained and self-referential business. For them, meaning is within the text and it will not always be separated in the form of the written text.

Thus, they may have paid special attention to literary devices just like irony, paradoxon, ambiguity, metaphor, repetition of images and symbols, and ambivalence. In the framework of this school, literature is, consequently , “defined on the basis of language and its complexities with no reference to the world outside the fictional text” (Eagleton, Literary Theory, “the Climb of British Novel, ” 24). Contrary to the first previously mentioned theories, Marxist criticism and Postcolonial critique have targeted mainly on the external situations rather than for the internal aspects of the literary text to define “literature”, believing in a strong romance between the last mentioned and ideology.

In this regard, Marxist critics include linked the definition of “literature” to the beginning of capitalism and the representation of cultural class conflicts and category distinctions. Simply by emphasizing the ideological position of literary works, they have stated that “the criteria of what counted as literature? were truthfully ideological: writing which put the ideals and tastes of a particular social course qualified because literature” (Eagleton, Literary Theory, “The Rise of English language Novel, ” 17). Hence, literature because an ideology is the motor vehicle of the principles and the preferences of the dominant social class.

In this perception, it has agreed to the world a false and contrived ideology that has served the desired goals of the hooligan class, contributed to the manipulation of the masses by the guttersnipe class, and caused the alienation of their perception of the world. In this regard, Terry Eagleton published that: Literary works would run through the masses in the behaviors of pluralistic thought and feeling, convincing them to acknowledge that more than one standpoint than theirs existed- specifically, that of all their masters.

It might communicate to them the moral riches of lout civilization, make an impression upon all of them a respect for middle-class achievements, and, since browsing is a great essentially solitary, contemplative activity, curb in them any kind of disruptive trend to communautaire political actions (Eagleton, Literary Theory, “The Rise of English Book, ” 25). In the same vein, Postcolonial theorists possess conceived of computer not as a great innocent body system of innovative writing, but as a dangerous application of the imperialist project. For them, literature is strongly affiliated with Western electricity and hegemony.

According to Elleke Bohemer, the danger with this literature, which has been informed by simply theories regarding the superiority of the European tradition and the rightness of disposition, resides in the contributions that made imperialism and all the atrocities seem to be part of the natural order of things (Boehmer, Theory of Literature, 03). Most Postcolonial critics include stated that Western books has created a great “Other” because the opposite of the West as well as its civilization, and projected after him every one of the negative features such as primitiveness, backwardness, cannibalism, ignorance, barbarism, laziness, paganism, etc . in order to justify the masked “mission civilisatrice” with the West.

Edward Said’s Orientalism shows: the collusion involving the literary textual content and the procedure for Western political domination, and the creation of images of the? Orient’ that separate the worlds with the colonizer as well as the colonized, usually imaging the latter as passive and backwards? fixed on time (Adim, The Colonial Surge of the Novel, 05). Relating to Edward cullen Said, Western literature utilized as a application to establish and look after an ideology that isolates the West from its Additional on the basis of the dichotomy of superiority/inferiority.

Therefore, like Marxist critics, to define “literature”, Postcolonial authorities assume the necessity of relating this to the ideological and sociable contexts that contain produced it. For them, therefore , limiting oneself to the interior aspects of the literary textual content is not a valid solution to define “literature”. In conclusion, based on what has become stated over concerning the two major reasons why “literature” is difficult to specify authoritatively: the problem to distinguish between fact and fiction in literature; plus the irreconcilable distinctions between the socially-based definitions of “literature” as well as the linguistically-based kinds, indeterminacy continues to be the only accurate nature ascribed to “literature”.

It continues to be unauthoritatively identified from distinct perspectives, and the controversy over this issue continue to persists among the list of academics as well as the scholars. Functions Cited Adim, Firdaous. The Colonial Rise of the Book.

London: Routledge, 1993. Boehmer, Elleke. Imperialiste and Postcolonial Literature. London, uk: Oxford School Press, 1995. Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1983.

Wellek, 3rd there�s r. and Warren, A. Theory of Literary works. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. London: Oxford University Press, 1977.