Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction: "What is literature and does it matter?"
"Take the question 'What is a weed?' Is there an essence of 'weedness' -- a special something, a je ne sais quoi, that weeds share and that distinguishes them from non-weeds? Anyone who has been enlisted to help weed a garden knows how hard it is to tell a weed from a non-weed and may wonder whether there is a secret. What would it be? How do you recognize a weed? Well, the secret is that there isn't a secret. Weeds are simply plants that gardeners don't want to have growing in their gardens. If you were curious about weeds, seeking the nature of 'weedness', it would be a waste of time to try to investigate their botanical nature, to seek distinctive formal or physical qualities that make plants weeds. You would have to carry out instead historical, sociological, perhaps psychological enquiries about the sorts of plants that are judged undesirable by different groups in different places" (Culler 23).
Culler gives us a helpful metaphor,
comparing literature to a weed. Like a weed, literature really is what human
beings define it as. It all comes down to what societies value today, and what
people have been taught to value throughout time. Literature, then, is based
upon what a society considers to be literature. But how do we know what society
defines as literature? This takes us back into multiple theoretical debates, in
which literary texts have been analyzed and classified as either literature or
books (such as Shakespeare’s works being called literature, while Twilight is just a book to read). Analyzing
language use, ideas in a work, how a text makes people think or feel, and many
other variables have been plugged into equations with the intent to solve the
question “what plus/minus what equals literature?”
The process of defining literature
is by no means an easy task to undertake. As Culler points out in the above
quotation, determining a concrete, scientific statement of what literature entails
a massive amount of work, looking at all sorts of different fields. It again
comes down to values. Because values are not set, neither then is literature,
or at least the reason why something is considered literature is not static. A
text that in the past was seen as valuable because of its eloquent use of language
may be seen as valuable today because it sheds light on inequality between
classes. In some ways, the manner in which you read a text can make it
literature. The application of theoretical methodologies takes a text and makes
it more than it might be on its own; literature, then is not born, but made by
those who read it.
