Showing papers by "Jonathan Culler published in 2007"

Commentary: What Is Literature Now?

Abstract: The question "What is literature?" is not, like "What is hematite?" asked out of ignorance. It is a question of interest only to those who already have a sense of the extension of the concept and who want, for whatever reason, to think about the defining or differen tial qualities of the phenomena to which, as they know perfectly well, the term is generally applied. In attempting to respond, one can talk about what literature does, how it functions in this or that society or institutional context, or one can inquire whether there are properties that literary works share and features that distinguish literature from other cultural objects or activities. The first approach can generate much interesting discussion of the role of literature in establishing or contesting a national culture, in giving concrete, vivid expression to moral, ethical, and developmental scenarios, in teaching disinterested appreciation, in establishing bourgeois hegemony, and so on. Literature has been given diametrically opposed functions?a set of stories that seduce readers into accepting the hierarchical structures of society, and a practice where ideology is challenged or subverted?but unless the functioning of literature is described in rather vacuous terms, there is not likely to be a single function that all literary works perform, and as soon as the functions or effects are described with enough specificity to become pertinent and interesting, one finds that each of these functions (constituting a nation, contesting ideology) can also be performed by nonliterary discourses. Adopting the second approach and trying to identify the defining features of works deemed literary leads to discussion of important charac teristics of literary works, such as their fictionality, their noninstrumental use of language, their high degree of organization that extends to levels and to linguistic features usually regarded as transparent, their dependent yet transformative relation to other texts regarded as literary; but, again, each of these qualities is likely also to be shared with works not usually regarded as literature. One of the major lessons of theory has been that literariness is not confined to literature but can be studied in historical