[Cross-posted at
Literature and Wordplay.]
Madeline Crum at The Huffington Post asks
what defines "literary fiction." While Crum considers this definition
for the benefit of booksellers, I want to add to this business approach
from a literary analytical perspective.
I have taught the introductory course to the English
major and minor, explaining how my university organizes the program and
showing how the tools of literary analysis can be applied to a variety
of texts, not only works traditionally thought to be literature--short
stories, novels, fictional texts, poems, and plays and films--but also
visual texts like comic books and graphic novels (
plug for my other site) and untraditional works. I define "literature" as any text that
can be subjected to literary analysis, as I will explain below. The
definitions are numerous, but as Crum points out, perhaps multiple definitions, similar to an online tagging experience, can expand how we define literature while not undermining the ways in which we read literature.
The following definitions from "literature" are adapted from Jonathan Culler's excellent summary for the Oxford
Very Short series,
Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction.
A
work of literature fulfills one or more of the following—even if these
characteristics of literature are contradictory:
1)
Literature is a form
of writing: It is a verb, and it
accomplishes something.
Literature has to give us something of significance—a bit of information, a new
way of seeing the world, a reason for why it is important.
2)
Literature is an
adjective: It describes the way
something is read.
As listed below, any text can be read as a work of literature should you use
methods of literary analysis--including but not limited to meter and rhythm, narrative point of view, rhyme,
textual organization and visual shape, and tone. Even translating a text requires word choices
that can alter the information provided, say, originally in Spanish and now
defined in Japanese.
3)
Literature is a
narrative, a story, or a history.
Literature tells a story that organizes a set of events or a set of information
into a form that is understandable for readers.
Literature does not have to be the truth; it can be made of facts, but
those facts don’t have to be accurate.
The story does not have to be exactly what happened or what we have come
to call “non-fictional”; the events can be re-organized for easier
comprehension or for greater interest and emotion.
Literature can include non-fiction and history; in fact, the word “history”
derives from the same Latin word for “story,” as history is only a set of
events organized into a narrative.
4)
Literature is the
totalization of all knowledge in some field, hence a philosophy of some
discipline. It is also the introduction
to a culture and its people, in contemporary life or the in the past.
Before the nineteenth century, “literature” referred to all information
pertaining to some study—the literature of history, the literature of science,
the literature of mathematics. Although
this definition is obsolete, it nevertheless reminds us that we can apply
literary analysis to any text: to a math
textbook, to a historical document, to a scientific report, to a newspaper
article, to a comic book, to a cereal box, to a television show.
As a body of knowledge, literature also mimics what you see in everyday
life: what the United States looks like,
how a small section of Mississippi really is, how someone actually lives in
China, what poverty is really like in the 1930s, how we would really behave in
a parallel universe where Charles Lindberg was president or where humans
evolved into mer-men. Literature reveals
human behavior, human cultures, and human societies.
Whether the descriptions of the characters are accurate or even offensive on
the basis of race, sex, sexuality, or religion, the text reveals the biases of
that author and hence the reality that author saw of his or her world—and maybe
how other persons saw that world. As
such, literature can offend us but can lead us to recognize proper
ethics, and to hold that much more strongly to our own convictions.
5)
Literature is art and
hence is useless—it provides only pleasure, hence only itself and nothing else.
Plato, Augustine, and many scholars condemned literature for
making readers sympathize with fictional persons rather than focusing on the
real world. Some of these scholars treated
overindulgence of literature as a sin.
Literature is only a piece of entertainment, no different from a movie, a video
game, or a comic book—it is a distraction from the real world and the things
that really matter in our lives: our
family, our friends, our politics, our environment, our world.
Literature does not give you a moral.
Literature does not give you information. Literature does not produce anything. Literature is enjoyed only for itself.
6)
Literature is the
study of word choice in rhetoric and performance.
When George W. Bush uses “freedom,” how does he define the word differently
than Barack Obama?
When Kenneth Brannan emphasizes “To be or not to be” in his version of Hamlet,
how does his reading of the line differ from that of Mel Gibson? Or when a performance of Hamlet uses
the soliloquy from the first published (but unauthorized and inaccurate)
printed addition of the play—“To be or not to be, ah, that’s the rub”—what
changes in the story of the play or the meter of the speech?
7)
Literature
de-familiarizes form and content: it
makes your world, your life, yourself seem different.
Emily Dickinson uses the color blue to describe a fly’s buzz to make you see (hear?)
that action differently, through synesthesia, confusing of one sense (vision)
for another (sound). William Faulkner tells
you a story from the point of view of a mentally challenged adult in order to
recognize events in a chronological order you had not anticipated. Literature presents a newspaper article as a
sonnet so that you can see the rhythm and form to non-fictional, prosaic
writing.
Literature is what keeps you awake all night wondering why your best friend used
that word in his email—was he being sarcastic?
What tone of voice did he mean?
How does that word differ from any other one, and how do those words
differ had you heard his voice on the phone or in person rather than in a piece
of electronic writing?
8)
Literature is a lie.
If literature de-familiarizes your world, then it is giving you a lie—showing
you life the way that you don’t see it.
Literature and fiction are not the same thing, but looking at the latter word
can clarify how we look at the former. The
etymology of the word “fiction” means “to make, to do,” hence the basis for our
word “fabrication.” Any time you write,
you are making something; in that sense, you are writing a work of fiction. Hence even non-fiction that you write—your journal,
a newspaper article, a historical report—is paradoxically a work of non-fiction
fiction.
Literature is limited by so many characteristics that it cannot bring an
absolute accurate description—it cannot bring us Truth with a capital “T”
because it is limited by the point of view of the writer (he or she cannot know
everything, cannot know all thoughts or motives of all persons involved in the
event), or limitations in language that prevent accurate description to foreign
readers (the English word for “transform” has very different connotations than
that same word in Japanese).
Literature may be defined as the totalization of any one field of study, but
the impossibility of totalizing all knowledge of any discipline means that
literature is trapped in an unfulfilled goal, hence a false promise—a lie.
9)
Literature is aware
of its form—it is self-reflexive.
Unlike other forms of communication or art, literature is aware that it is a
set of words written or spoken—hence it is aware that one word will produce a
different effect than another, that one rhythm will bring a tone of calmness or
a tone of anxiety, and that one organization of words can appear on a page in a
square appearance or can be modified to take the shape of an image, such as a
river, a bird, or an apple.
Literature is also aware of its tropes—those commonalities frequently found in
similar works, such as in genres of literature (detective, science fiction,
romance) or forms of writing (sonnets, political speeches). Being aware of its tropes, literature
recognizes its capacity for parody—the manner in which The Colbert Report
mimics the techniques of The O’Reilly Factor, including title, tone of
voice, rhythm of speech, televised images, and set design.
10)
Most importantly, literature
is always—always—significant and shared—it has an audience that finds the text
interesting.
A text written by one person but never read by another is not a work of
literature—no one gets to read it, discuss it, and find out how it is a work of
literature. Writing a blog that no one
reads is not literature until someone talks about it. The questions that could be inspired are
never brought up: Is the text
significant because of the person’s point of view—a first-person story rather
than a third-person account? Is the text
significant because of a word used? Or
the meter of the writing? Or the shape
of the text? Or the tone of voice? Or its capacity for parody?
But when people talk about literature, they have produced political change
because its readers have talked about it:
literature has stopped slavery, fought colonization, exposed prejudices,
inspired change.
Or people talking about a work of literature just secures its place on the New York Times best sellers’ list. Even Twilight is just as literary as Romeo and Juliet, The Woman
Warrior, and Harry Potter.
But this fact is the most important quality of literature: Unless you talk about that text with someone
else, it cannot be literature. Unless many
people discuss that one text, few people will get to see how it can be a work
of literature. Unless that text is
shared, that text will not reveal the culture or the time in which it was
written, hence will not provide the knowledge that literature can. Even
if no one read that text when it was first written, the fact that you read it
and are now talking about it makes that text a work of literature.
