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What Is Literature?
Reading, Assessing, Analyzing
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What is “Literature”?
In the last 50 years, the very meaning of “Literature” and “reading” and “criticism” has undergone deep alteration
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Literature:
Traditionally, literature is “imaginative” writing---writing which is not literally true
HOWEVER: the distinction between “real” and “fake” or “fact” and “fiction” isn’t always a good distinction; many classical works were non-fiction
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What do we mean when we say something is “Literary”?
“Some texts are born literary, some achieve literariness, and some have
literariness thrust upon them.”
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Is literature dictated by context?
I’m your teacher. I have several college degrees. If I tell you it’s LITERATURE, am I to be believed?
Many works of “literature” that we study in college were constructed to BE literature, but many were not.
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What qualities in form and content make a text . . .
LITERARY?
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Language
Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language
Literature deviates systematically from everyday speech
Language in literature draws attention to itself
--This is what the FORMALISTS thought--Russians in the early 1900s who organized literary criticism around language
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When “Language” is the only criteria of “literary”, what types
of texts are ignored?
Should these types of texts be ignored? Why? Why Not?
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The problem with language. . .
“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 homogeneous linguistic community.”
--Terry Eagleton, literary critic and scholar
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What happens when one language is preferred over
another?
Can language reveal your: class, race, ethnicity, educational level,
gender?
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If literature were only based on how language were used
Everything would be poetry.
What other qualities can we look at that might help us to define the “literariness” of a text?
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The truth is:
If “they” (the critics, scholars etc) say you’re literature, then you are!
If “they” say you aren’t, then you aren’t!
“Literature” is a formal, empty sort of definition.
“Literature” has no “essence.”
“Literature” is dependent upon the way people relate themselves to the writing.
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Literature is Subjective
Since the 1980’s, the “literary canon” of works--a group of works “agreed upon” to be “the best” by well-known scholars and critics, has been disputed
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Why do you think the “canon” was disputed?
And who forwarded the charge of dispute?
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The “Canon” excluded most works that were not by white,
European males
Works of literature by women, homosexuals, and works by
individuals of varied races, classes and ethnicities were marginalized
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How did this happen?
There are many ways of “writing”--but those in power recognized only one, formal way of “writing,” and this was given the higher value
Thus, the literary “canon” is a construct; it was fashioned by particular people for particular reasons at a particular time.
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There is no literary work or tradition that has value in and of
itself
Even Shakespeare!
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In his era, Shakespeare was regarded as a hack!
It’s true! Time and circumstance has offered the value to particular texts; and this “value” is a transitive term--it will change as the people in power change and are altered, and according to the context of the reading of a particular text.
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10 Years Ago
BLOGS were stupid. NOW:
Iraq War Veterans BLOGS are considered vital historic and
“literary” documents!
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Revisioning the Canon:
All “literary” works are unconsciously rewritten by the
societies that read them.
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Context:
Readers interpret literary works in the light of their own concerns
Readers interpret literary works in the light of a given circumstance
Readers interpret literary works in the light of a given time period
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The Diary of Anne Frank:
Literature? Or Not?
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HOWL by Allen Ginsberg
BANNED in its era. . .
LITERATURE? Or not?
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“I Have A Dream”--
Is this speech by Martin Luther King, Jr. Literature? Or Not?
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Literature and “value”
You see, each of us is constructed of experiences and backgrounds and emotions and ideas and prejudices and knowledge and lack of knowledge. . .
How we each respond to a particular text is deeply entwined with our broader prejudices and belief systems.
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It’s not our fault!
We’re HUMAN.
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Thus, Literature is defined by:
Experience Context
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Multi-cultural and Multi-ethnic Literatures
Uniquely situated to view under this broader banner of who I am and where I’m from, and how these things contribute to what I write
YOU are invited to contextualize yourself as well--who YOU are and in what context you’re reading these texts in order to understand how you ‘read’ a particular text
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So: WHAT IS LITERATURE?
What constitutes a “literary” text?
What qualities will help me to determine the ‘literariness’ of a text?
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YOU tell ME
At the end of this course. . .