Lecture notes: What is Literature? Part One

[These revised lecture notes from my Intro to Lit. classes might be of some interest to the hoi polloi in netland... -J. Esch]

What is literature? That's a good question to start with. Is literature a special kind of writing?

Followup question: Can all instances of written language be treated as literature? In the broadest sense, the answer to the question is YES. Any piece of writing is an artifact that uses language as its basic mode of communication. We can study anything and interpret it as a “text”. Every text is a product of a particular author or multiple authors within a particular culture at a given historical moment. Even texts that aren't written down (like oral poetry and folk songs) are, in a sense, composed; and by by extension belong to the world of written discourse, because they are recorded and transmitted from person to person, down through history from past to present. Anthing capable of being recorded is in that sense “written”. But if this is true, then what's so special about this category called literature? Why aren't we devoting a writing class to the reading and interpretation of laundry lists, newspaper accounts, biographies, ads, and essays? We would presume that the category of texts conventionally known as literature has some kind of value or worth that gives it importance and makes it worthy of study.

Literature, as it has come to be known, goes beyond the scope of simple day-to-day communication of information, purpose, instruction. So what is it that literature communicates, and how? Should we even set literature aside in its own category? What marks a text as being literary?

When we recognize a text as literary, how much of that recognition relies on how we choose to interpret the text? Since every text can be interpreted by a particular reader within a particular culture at a particular historical moment, and each reader will understand and choose to interpret that text in any number of ways, have we led ourselves into a maze? Can we find our way out towards a general definition?
Here's one answer: the Oxford English dictionary defines literature as "writing which has claim to consideration on the ground of beauty of form or emotional effect." We'll discuss beauty of form later. For now, let's move directly to emotional effect.

Emotional Effect
Literature is writing that appeals to your emotions (more than other types of writing). Among its many effects, literature primarily communicates feeling, the feeling of what is like to live, to suffer, to endure, to win and lose, to love and hate, to be born and die.

Important stuff, these matters of the heart and soul. Literature conveys these emotional states in ways that other texts downplay, trivialize or ignore. When you read a scientific paper, for instance, you're not likely to gather anything from the text about the author's “feelings” towards the subject matter or what it feels like to be a scientist. It's not relevant to the purpose at hand. Literature conversely, veritably invites you to participate in the experience it is depicting on the page. That's a fundamental difference. For a nice illustration of this difference, look at Whitmans' “When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer,” which dramatizes the difference between a scientific knowledge of the cosmos and a direct human experience of the stars.

Think of the reasons why people read any text (literary or non literary). Do people always read just to gather facts, information, instruction? Sometimes, yes, that's all we need. Just the facts, thank you. We may read to find out what's going on in the world, what courses we're going to take next semester; we read to learn new subject matter that we can use. Are any of those kinds of reading emotional in any way? Rarely.

Sometimes (more often than we'd like to admit) we have this need to read texts that move us emotionally. We read in order to feel, to feel something that makes us laugh or cry, something that makes us happy, nostalgic, bittersweet, suspenseful, excited, liberated, rapturous. This kind of reading puts us in touch with our emotions. It gives us permission to identify and empathize with characters, to relate our isolated self to other selves.

Reading and Self Discovery
Yet it must be admitted that the very activity of reading itself is one of the most solitary experiences you're likely to participate in, especially in our cluttered, oversaturated world of electronic media, technology, materialism – our life in the fast lane. You must make time for reading, and it takes time and privacy. Reading isn't merely solitary, it is silent. The transaction between book and reader's eye is quiet, meditative. The text doesn't make a noise. Reading is akin to a state of mediation or prayer.

The difference between reading and meditation however, is that you have before you clear evidence of another self who has written something for your eyes. This writer is trying to tell you something. If you open yourself up to the experience of literature, you will discover that you're not really alone; there is a vast world between those covers to be explored and discovered. Ironically, this experience, which appears to be so quiet and lonely, can turn out to be your passport to other worlds. Appearances can be deceiving.

There are a couple of ways you can look at the reading process. One is in terms of opening out and escape, the other as diving deep and gaining entry to the interior. Both are forms of liberation and self discovery.

Going out
We read to escape the "real world", to check out for a while. To get out of ourselves and our humdrum existence. To break the daily routine. To help the time pass by. To play in some other part of our consciousness. To exercise our emotional imagination.
Let's face it. We can't do it all. Life's necessities and the vicissitudes of fate prevent us from doing as the Army advertisement enjoins: “be all you can be.” Our reach is limited. Our means are limited. But literature offers a passport to other worlds, civilizations, time periods, regions, cultures, selves. When we travel there, we relate our life experience to the ones we encounter in the text. Literature gives you the opportunity to role play, to re-imagine yourself in different contexts, and through this experimental interplay, you learn more about your self, who you are, where you come from, what your values and beliefs are. We also learn to see as others see, think as others think, which has the humane benefit of opening your capacity for empathy, compassion, understanding, and acceptance of the richness and diversity of the human experience.

Going In
The 20th century Czech writer Franz Kafka wrote “a book must be an ice axe to break the sea frozen inside us.” Maybe we read as a way to enter into a "deeper world", an interior space in our consciousness, something half submerged beneath layers of habit and superficial thinking, where emotions and imagination have their source. In short, we read to get in better touch with ourselves, with the core of our being. Who am I? Who are we? What are we here for? What's the point? Reading literature can help you explore those questions.

Sven Birkerts, author of The Gutenberg Elegies, claims that serious reading is a kind of deep sea diving that makes available to you "in a most portable form, an ulterior existence. We hold in our hands a way to cut against the momentum of the times. We can resist the skimming tendency and delve; we can restore, if only for a time, the vanishing assumption of coherence.”

Reading puts you in touch with something that lasts longer than last week's episode of The Real World or what you got for Christmas.

This, I think, is what is meant by "emotional effect." We read literature to tap into emotional wellsprings in ourselves, and to open ourselves outwardly so that we connect with other people, other experiences. If you think of selfhood as a set of concentric circles consisting of collective soul, individual soul, mind, feeling, and body. It is the emotions that fall closest to the truth of our bodies, the domain of breath, heart, pleasure and pain. Literature shoots from the outer layers to the inner and connects you to that emotional center.

Literature, play, and usefulness
As I noted above, appearances can be deceiving, and viewed from a Puritan or pragmatic point of view, reading and studying literature is a waste of time. It is one of the most useless things you can do. Something people do because they're bored and have nothing better to do, a hobby for idlers, the lazy, the privileged with a surfeit of leisure time. As the great wit Oscar Wilde says ironically in his preface to Dorian Gray, “all art is quite useless.” Wilde, who lived in the Victorian Age, a time dominated by moralism, utility, and industry, is responding to a Philistine attitude toward art. Art appreciation doesn't have any discernible practical value. It's not going to make you rich and famous. It's not going to save your soul. It's not going to feed the hungry or save the world or the whales. And yet, literature's very uselessness may be one of its greatest strengths because it takes you out of the day-to-day realm into the realm of the imaginary and the emotional, as opposed to the world of work, literature is a world to play in.

Play is a form of disinterested pleasure. It's an activity whose end is itself. Play is its own fulfillment. It provides psychological relief, and beyond that play is not connected with your needs, sustenance, survival. Play has no utility, in the sense we're accustomed to. As spiritual creatures we need this sort of disinterested contemplation and activity. It's a good thing. Those of who you play sports or enjoy video games should be able to identify. Play isn't just for kids; grown ups should play more! Reading literature gives you the opportunity to exercise your imagination. It lets your mind roam, play, expand, and pretend. I encourage you to think of reading literature as a kind of play.

Perhaps literature has some utility after all. Admittedly, it is an oblique sort of practical benefit. The literary critic Kenneth Burke said we can use literature as “equipment for living,” which means that we can look to art and literature for models of human conduct, behaviors and moral situations we can identify with and learn from. Literature offers a world where you can “play out” these ideas on the stage of your imagination, and take away lessons or kernels of wisdom from the encounter. I hesitate to imply that literature always contains a “moral.” Some literature certainly does; most of it isn't so clear cut as that. What I do think Burke was getting at is the observation that we can approach literature and read it in a manner that it can be applied to our lives – it can help give our lives meaning, help us chart our way through life's decisions and gateways, and it can remind us that in the game of life, we are not in this alone.

Literature and the imagination
I keep bringing up this word imagination, and because imagination is fundamental to the production and reception of literature, it's worthwhile to establish precisely what we mean by it. It takes imagination to write literature, and I would assert, it takes imagination to read it.

What does it mean to imagine? The verb is defined in four ways:
(1)to form a mental concept of what is not actually present to the senses, e.g. “imagine what your car looks like right now”
(2)to consider actions or events not yet in existence, e.g. “imagine what your next class is going to be like”
(3)to reformulate images or concepts of external objects not present to the senses from memory; e.g. “describe what you did on your first day in college”, “remember the first person you ever loved”
(4)to use the power of the mind to form concepts beyond external objects, including the operation of fantastic thought or fancy; and to exercise the creative faculties, to form new conceptions, which is also known as poetic genius. An example of the fourth would be “imagine what it would be like to live on Mars. Or write a poem about a character who has fallen in love for the first time in her life.” Or imagine a great poet from Ancient Rome leading your on a tour through Hell.
Imaginative literature is the kind of writing that regularly exploits the mental powers of formulating things not immediately present. In essence, all art is always about "making stuff up". It takes imagination to depict the world in language: a world as it is, as it has been, as it could or could never be.

It's interesting to note how the etymology of words for literature's conventional genres are synonyms or derivatives of words for “forming” or "making stuff up".

Fiction: derives from the Latin word fictus, the past participle of fingere, meaning "to fashion, form, imitate, invent"
Poetry - derived from the Greek word poetes, which meant "maker, creator, producer, composer" and its cognate poiein “to create”.
Drama: means a play, a mimic action performed for amusement. derives from ancient Greek word δραμα, meaning "deed, act, to perform, to do".

Creative Reading
Ralph Waldo Emerson says “one must be an inventor to read well.” The kind of reading we're practicing in this class is something a bit more difficult than the kind of reading you may be accustomed to, like the books you read at the beach. This is something more focused, concentrated, attentive, meditative, and challenging.

To get the most out of literature, you need to invest time, attention and imaginative energy. You must be a creative reader. You must bring your imagination to the table and really use it as you work your way through a text. That is the only way to discover its value, its truth.

Emerson, the great champion of American individualism, knows this is not such an easy path to take. In his essay “The American Scholar,” he maintains that the scholar (any intellectual or thinking person seeking self understanding) must face up to his or her duty of being free and brave in the quest for truth.

In the long period of this preparation he must betray often an ignorance and shiftlessness in popular arts, incurring the disdain of the able who shoulder him aside. Long he must stammer in his speech; often forego the living for the dead. Worse yet, he must accept – how often! -- poverty and solitude. For the ease and pleasure of treading the old road, accepting the fashions, the education, the religion of society, he takes the cross of making his own, and, of course, the self-accusation, the faint heart, the frequent uncertainty and loss of time, which are the nettles and tangling vines in the way of the self-relying and self-directed; and the state of virtual hostility in which he seems to stand to society, and especially to educated society. For all this loss and scorn, what offset? He is to find consolation in exercising the highest functions of human nature.

This journey is not for everybody. You're going to be on your own. It's not going to be easy. Nobody can cultivate this field but you. It will set you apart from the crowd. You will have to define fashion, education, and religion for yourself. You'll doubt yourself. You'll forego certainty in life. People may even hate you for what you stand for. And yet, the payoff, the jackpot, is that you will develop yourself into a full human being. Your humanity lays undeveloped within you. Your quest for truth will lead you “to find consolation in exercising the highest functions of human nature.”

Reading literature is a little bit like Frost's “The road not taken”, it is the road less travelled, and it might make a big difference. I encourage you to entertain the thought that literature is something more than entertainment and distraction (fun as those may be), rather literature can be used as equipment for living. The open road is there for the taking. It offers you the chance to reconsider who you really are, what you're all about, why you're here. By reading stories, poems, and plays drama, you pass on through to a great human drama, full of pain and rapture, joy and beauty. Will reading literature really make a difference? That's largely up to you.