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What is Literature?
One might think that, at the very least, literature is works of the written word. Not to fall into etymological fallacy, but the word literature implies literacy, therefore it is a medium that is to be written and read. This definition is broad without being meaningless, it encompasses fiction and non-fiction, poetry and prose. However, there are problems.
Were the Iliad and Odyssey, for example, not literature before they were recorded in writing? These epic poems are foundational in Western literature, so it would seem odd that they were at one point not themselves literature even when the narratives of each were fully fleshed. This problem applies equally to other works belonging to various oral traditions, Homer's works being used as an illustration. For the sake of these works, can it be said that literature is that with a narrative?
This definition is now too broad to be meaningful, anything can have narrative. Films, still images, works of music, rocks, etc. Even where no narrative might be thought to exist, as with rocks, narrative can be inserted or created to fit the object. Why rock? How rock?
This leads one to consider this process of creating narrative. If literature is not "that which has narrative," perhaps it could be the creation of narrative? Literature then is a method which is applied to objects, let's call them "texts," and produces meaning therein. This definition is not meaningless, as it pertains to a mode of action and thought. While this mode can still be used for all texts in the world, it is not the things which are "literature" but the process.
Literature does not fall within the realm of the text but in establishing or producing a narrative meaning from texts. This applies, again, to fiction and non-fiction, poetry and prose, but also to bodies, trees, rocks, cities, and on and on ad nauseam.
This is all assuming literature is just one thing, which seems kind of foolish to me. I hope y'all remember where we are and don't take this post too seriously. Nonetheless, I'd be interested to see what you think.
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Reply to this and you will get a gf at the end of this year
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>>8207441
OP here
To be clear, this is not me
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this thread will die
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You should try developing your own texts, OP.
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"Works of literary art are texts that are intended by their authors to furnish such values to readers who adopt the relevant kinds of reading strategies."
It's the best definition I found so far.
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>Were the Iliad and Odyssey, for example, not literature before they were recorded in writing?
I spent the beginning of the year going deep into the oral folk tradition of the world with my students, and found myself going over this territory more than once, so I'll interpret your question through that lens.
For example, the story we know as "Snow White" is heavily influenced by the version of the story recorded by the hermanos Grimm (as that is the version that was popularised and therefore disseminated) which was in turn influenced by the norms and tropes of the time it was written. These include the near worship of aristocracy and royalty, allusions to God, the marriage of a child to a man (snow white was unambiguously seven years old in the Grimm tale when she was married) and so on. Earlier versions of the story, or versions from other countries, vary in ways that can be understood in terms of their time and place. This is due to the reality that oral tradition is historically more malleable and is modified quite freely to fit the norms of the time and place. "Literature" by contrast is (relatively, for we still have "interpretation") rigid - not because we can never alter or rewrite it but because it is replicable and permanent in a way that spoken transmission is not.
Like the ancient Greek stories to which you refer, the stories in the European folk tale tradition was extant in oral tradition long before they they were ever codified; however there is something in the codification which is important, and seems to be a definite constituent part of what //literature// is.
Making permanent what was once ephemeral.
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>>8207436
I have no idea what it officially means. To me it just means the study of stories, what makes them so good, how they are told, and all that.
That's why I come here to post about my shitty Transformers fanfic. I consider it lit.
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>>8207436
definitions are by definition, subjective
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>>8210019
According to you
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Do you overthink absolutely everything in your life?
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>>8207436
>in establishing or producing a narrative meaning from texts.
But there are plenty of non-narrative poems, no? and likewise the same for fiction which lacks linearity. Take Jean Rhy's Good Morning Midnight for example - its less of a story than it is a disorientated psychological portrait of feminine hysteria and post-natal depression - and if you can order its 'events' into a linear narrative sequence, then hats off to you.
What literature actually 'is' might have had some fairly reasonable definitions in the early modern age, but all that was thrown out the window when modernist fiction and poetics started tearing holes in it. The pressing question for literature today, as far as I see it, is not 'what does it mean?' but rather 'how does it work?'. In treating literature as such you lose, broadly speaking, the authoritative concept of 'literature' as a totalising designation, but that loss also acts as an opening through which the significance of textual criticism extends beyond the marginal limits of textual enquiry. Reading is no longer an interpretive act, but rather a productive mechanism that describes the world and brings it into being simultaneously.
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>>8212693
I like what you've written here, but isn't determining that
> it is a disorientated psychological portrait of feminine hysteria and post-natal depression
a form of narrative creation? The creation of meaning that is only possible through engagement with the text?
Broadly agree with everything else in your post, but I don't see it as mutually exclusive to the OP
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>What is Literature?
What indeed Socrates?
Literature is inextricably tied to the human acts of reading and writing. In these two acts I find the whole of reality. In Reading you have the passive, the feminine. In Writing the creative chaos that always is the more physical to the nonphysical Reading. Writing always tied to typewriters, keyboards, pencils and pens and paper, Reading tied to books and favorite characters, remembering moments and truths, meanings gleaned.
In the history of Philosophy an inherent duality of discourse is apparent, Plato/Aristotle as the condition manifested. Is not Reading/Writing merely an expression of this law of nature?
So what is literature? The infinite argument and search, becoming and abyss of Reading/Writing, an expression of an ancient axiom.
Also it has something to do with books
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>>8213159
>a form of narrative creation? The creation of meaning that is only possible through engagement with the text?
I see your point, but I'd disagree only insofar as I think there is a distinction to be made between narrative creation and the production of meaning. My point was that meaning persists even if I am incapable of organising the events presented to me into a narrative as such.
Narrative is structural (objective), meaning is phenomenological (subjective) - but the kind of trauma Sasha experiences in GMM is so severe that the former becomes completely dissolved into the latter, leaving the reader not much to go on in terms of how the events in the novel actually progress.
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>>8207436
can there be literature with no narrative
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>>8213212
I had been taking narrative and meaning to mean (haha) the same thing
While the distinction you're making is clear, I don't think it's absolutely necessary. I'll think on it some more, though, thanks
>>8213224
Yeah we're addressing that
Again, I think that narrative doesn't belong to the texts themselves but to the person doing the reading, and that establishing cogent meaning equates to narrative
So while there are texts that don't "contain" narrative, the process of understanding what the text is is narrative
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>>8213241
>So while there are texts that don't "contain" narrative, the process of understanding what the text is is narrative
And further, as it says in OP, determining a narrative is literature in my view
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>>8209480
>intended by their authors
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