A very good introduction to the subject is Terry Eagleton’s “Introduction: What is Literature?” (the first chapter of Literary Theory: An Introduction). In it, he enumerates several ways by which we usually define literature. But then he also interrogates each definition to the point that whatever certainty we had about what literature is ultimately breaks apart.

The first definition he lists is: literature is “imaginative writing” — that is, fictional as opposed to factual writing. And perhaps most of us would agree with this, until Eagleton points out that not all texts considered literature are fictional (he points to Francis Bacon’s essays and John Donne’s sermons as proof) nor are all fiction pieces considered literature (citing Superman comic books as an example).

Eagleton then turns his attention to the definition of literature as, quoting Roman Jakobson, “a kind of writing which … represents an ‘organized violence committed on ordinary speech.’” This kind of writing “uses language in peculiar ways” not necessarily to communicate ideas or emotions but to focus attention on language itself (just like some abstract paintings use paint not to attempt any representation of actual objects but to foreground in our perception the materiality of the medium). And when we think of some literary pieces (James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake comes easily to mind), this definition seems apt. But then Eagleton asks, what is “ordinary language”? How do we know a particular speech is a deviation and not just a community’s different way of expressing an idea or emotion? And how come figurative language is just as common in “ordinary language” as it is in so-called literary texts?

And, Eagleton asks, what if we insist on reading as literary a text that wasn’t really meant to be literature — even if its language is apparently referential and its intent pragmatic? Eagleton uses the example of a drunken man reading more than is “intended” in a notice that reads: “Dogs must be carried on the escalator.” Should texts with self-referential and nonpragmatic language necessarily qualify it as literature?

Seems not. There are no inherent qualities that make a text literary. Eagleton says literature is a “construct” — it is what a particular group of people at a particular point in time says it is. Why they say so is a matter of value-judgment, of their subjective evaluation of texts. What a particular group says is reflective of their “ideology” — by which Eagleton defines “roughly, [as] the ways in which what we say and believe connects with the power-structure and power-relations of the society we live in” and, more particularly, as “those modes of feeling, valuing, perceiving and believing which have some kind of relation to the maintenance and reproduction of social power.”

What we would call literature, then, may seem a product of our subjective valuation of certain texts. But these valuations, according to Eagleton, “have their roots in deeper structures of belief which are apparently unshakeable.”

Perhaps it is wise to ponder, as a Creative Writing student, what texts do we call literature? And why? And should we, can we, break away from how literature is currently defined? How would that literature look like?

To quote (again) Terry Eagleton quoting George Gordon, early Professor of English Literature at Oxford (in Chap. 2, “The Rise of English,” Literary Theory: An Introduction): “England is sick, and … English literature must save it. The Churches (as I understand) having failed, and social remedies being slow, English literature has now a triple function: still, I suppose, to delight and instruct us, but also, and above all, to save our souls and heal the State” (22).

What better remedial tool to “cultivate the philistine middle class, who have proved unable to underpin their political and economic power with a suitably rich and subtle ideology” (24).

Like religion, literature is “an extremely effective form of ideological control … [i]t is affective and experiential, entwining itself with the deepest unconscious roots of the human subject … capable of operating at every social level … [providing] an excellent social ‘cement’ … [with the] capacity to ‘materialize’ beliefs as practices … [and has] a pacifying influence, fostering meekness, self-sacrifice and the contemplative inner life” (23).

Eagleton points to Matthew Arnold as the key figure in this project. Arnold believed that “the traditional style of the aristocracy … have something of the ideological wherewithal to lend a hand to their middle class masters. State-established schools, by linking the middle class to ‘the best culture of their nation,’ will confer on them ‘a greatness and a noble spirit, which the tone of these classes is not of itself at present adequate to impart’” (24).

So English as a subject “was first institutionalized not in the Universities, but in the Mechanics’ Institutes, working men’s colleges and extension lecturing circuits. English was literally the poor man’s Classics — a way of providing a cheapish ‘liberal’ education for those beyond the charmed circles of public schools and Oxbridge” (27).

I would like to pretend I’m from the upper class and be a snob and, sitting in the library (like the image to the right grabbed from Raby Castle), say: “No, that’s not how we look at literature. Literary texts, for us, are only those that belong to what we call the Greats.” Because, as Terry Eagleton says in “The Rise of English” (Chap. 2 of Literary Theory: An Introduction): “[t]he criteria of what counted as literature [in 18th-century England] … were frankly ideological: writing which embodied the values and ‘tastes’ of a particular social class qualified as literature, whereas a street ballad, a popular romance and perhaps even the drama did not” (17).

Every time I sit down to write a poem, however, I have to admit that my idea of literature is one “of ‘felt experience,’ ‘personal response’ or ‘imaginative uniqueness’” (18). And that makes me a post-Romantic, really.

But this idea of literature only gained prominence in the 19th century, “[w]ith the need to incorporate the increasingly powerful but spiritually rather raw middle classes into unity with the ruling aristocracy, to diffuse polite social manners, habits of ‘correct’ taste and common cultural standards” (17). This concept of literature required “a narrowing of the category … to so-called ‘creative’ or ‘imaginative’ work” (18). This definition of literature as “imaginative” carried with it an ambiguity suggestive of this attitude: it has a resonance of the descriptive term ‘imaginary,’ meaning ‘literally untrue,’ but also an evaluative term, meaning ‘visionary’ or ‘inventive’” (18).

Developed sometime around the revolutionary period in America and France and the rise of an industrial capitalist England, the definition of literature as “visionary” took on an added meaning as “a whole alternative ideology, and the ‘imagination’ itself … becomes a political force” (20) against the “crassly philistine Utilitarianism [that was] rapidly becoming the dominant ideology of the industrial middle class, fetishizing fact, reducing human relations to market exchanges and dismissing art as unprofitable ornamentation” (19). And literature’s task was “to transform society in the name of those energies and values which art embodies” (20).

But art and literature was losing the battle against the commodification of everything in society. It is no wonder that “imaginative” writing would seek refuge in the new aesthetic, removed from the turmoil of the everyday, and safe in its art-for-art’s sake ivory tower.

And that’s where we, creative writers and literary scholars, sometimes find ourselves locked up. As a defense mechanism, we turn our noses up at the world that moves on. Oblivious of our presence.

But that’s only one side of our post-Romantic selves …