“What Is Literature?”

Perhaps literature is definable not according to whether it is fictional or imaginative, but because it uses language in peculiar ways. . . . Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language . . . 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.

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, telescoped, drawn out, turned on its head. It was language made strange.

The idea that there is a single “normal” language, a common currency shared equally by all members of society, is an illusion. Any actual language consists of a highly complex range of discourses, differentiated according to class, region, gender, status, and so on, which can by no means be neatly unified into a single homogenous linguistic community. . . One person’s norm may be another person’s deviation.

If we were to stumble across an isolated scrap of writing from some long-vanished civilization, we could not tell whether it was poetry or not merely by inspecting it, since we might have no access to that society’s “ordinary” discourses.

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.

It is true that many of the works studied as literature in academic institutions were “constructed” to be read as literature, but it is also true that many of them were not. A piece of writing may start off life as history or philosophy and then come to be ranked as literature.

In this sense, 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 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. In fact it would be as impossible as trying to identify the single distinguishing feature which all games have in common. There is no “essence” of literature whatsoever.

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? In many societies “literature” has served highly practical functions.

By and large people term “literature” writing they think is good.

Nobody would bother to say that a bus ticket is was an example of inferior literature, but someone might well say that the poetry of Ernest Dowson was. The term “fine writing,” or “belles letters,” is in this sense ambiguous: it denotes a sort of writing which generally is highly regarded.

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 one and for all the illusion that the category “literature” is objective, in the sense of being eternally given and immutable. Anything can be literature, and anything regarded as unalterable and unquestionably literature—Shakespeare, for example—can cease to be literature.

The reason why it follows from the definition of literature as highly-valued writing that it is not a stable entity is that value-judgments are notoriously variable. . . Just as people may treat a work of philosophy in one century and as literature in the next, or vice versa, so they may change their minds about what writing they consider valuable.

But it does mean that the so-called “literary canon,” the unquestioned “great tradition” of a “national literature,” has to be recognized as a construct, fashioned by a particular people for particular reasons at a certain time . . . “Value” is a transitive term: it means whatever is valued by a certain people in specific situations . . . we may in the future produce a society which is unable to get anything at all out of Shakespeare. His works may seem desperately alien . . . in such a situation Shakespeare would be no more valuable than much present-day graffiti.

The fact is that we always interpret literary works to some extent in the light of our own concerns . . . “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 these texts elements to value or devalue . . . 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.”

Excerpts taken from Literary Criticism, Terry Eagleton, 1983