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What Is "Literature"?

A first challenge in reading world literature is that the very idea of literature has meant many different things over the centuries and around the world. At its most general, "literature" simply means "written with letters" - really, any text at all. If you go to see your doctor about a persistent cough and she says "I'll pull up the latest literature on tuberculosis," she means medical reports, not Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain. Even in more artistic contexts, many cultures have made no firm distinctions between imaginative literature and other forms of elevated writing. "Belles-lettres" would be a good translation of the ancient Egyptian term medet nefret, "beautiful words," which could refer to any form of rhetorically heightened composition, whether poetry, stories, philosophical dialogues, or speeches. The classical Chinese term wen designated poetry and artistic prose but carried a much wider set of meanings, including pattern, order, and harmonious design. In Europe, reflecting older ideas of literature as "humane letters," the concept of literature remained quite broad throughout the eighteenth century but came to be increasingly restricted to imaginative works of poetry, drama, and prose fiction. This understanding has become the norm around the world, including in the meanings now given to such terms as wenxue in Chinese, bungaku in Japanese, and adab in Arabic.

Still, these terms can be applied either very broadly or quite restrictively. Often readers only admit some poems and novels into the category of "real" literature, considering Harlequin romances and Stephen King thrillers as little more than verbal junk food, unworthy of inclusion in the company of Dante and Virginia Woolf. Even farther from the realm of literature are advertising jingles. Though it certainly represents a minimal form of poetry, a jingle isn't meant to be savored for its beauty; its meter and rhyme are used purely instrumentally, to help the message lodge in your mind so that you'll remember to buy a particular brand of toothpaste.

Even in the sense of belles-lettres, literature can be defined to varying degrees of breadth. Great scientific writers such as Charles Darwin and eloquent essayists such as Montaigne or Lin Yutang offer many rewards to a reader who pays close attention to their language and to the shaping of ideas and of the narrative in their works. Sigmund Freud actually won a leading German literary award, the Goethe Prize, given him in recognition of the artistry of his psychoanalytical case studies, and he is often taught in literature courses next to Proust, Kafka, and Woolf. Literature anthologies now regularly include religious and philosophical texts, essays, autobiographical writing, and examples of creative nonfiction along with the poems, plays, and prose fiction that still occupy the bulk of their pages. Literature has expanded even beyond its root sense of works "written with letters," to include oral compositions by illiterate poets and storytellers. Movies and television series give audiences many of the pleasures that novels gave nineteenth-century readers, and "literature" can appropriately be considered in its broad sense to include works of aural and visual narrative, from movies to manga and poetic podcasts.

In view of this variety, we need to prepare ourselves to read different works with different expectations. Primo Levi's haunting holocaust memoir Survival in Auschwitz would lose much of its force if it turned out that Auschwitz had never existed or that Levi hadn't been interned there, whereas for readers of Boccaccio's Decameron it hardly matters whether there was an actual plague in Florence that forced people to flee the city and start telling each other ribald stories in the countryside. And quite apart from its real-world reference, there is the question of what literature is for. In many parts of the world, early theorists and practitioners understood poetry not only in terms of metrics or metaphors but as a mode of particularly intimate address. According to the Sanskritist Sheldon Pollock,

before the modern period people in South Asia were very careful to distinguish the sacred Veda from what later would be called kavya [literally the "work of the kavi"], for which "literature" in our contemporary sense is a good translation. . The Veda was said to act like a master in giving us commands; ancient lore and legends (purana) like a friend in offering us advice; and literature like a lover in seducing us. (Pollock, "Early South Asia," 803-5)

By contrast, the Roman poet Horace expected that literature should have a public value, and famously remarked in his Ars poetica that good poetry should be dulce but also utile - both sweet and useful.

Writing in 1790, Immanuel Kant downplayed literature's use value in his influential Critique of Judgment, in which he defined art as "purposeful without purpose" ("zweckmäßig ohne Zweck," 173). Following Kant a century later, fin-de-siècle aesthetes celebrated "art for art's sake" rather than valuing it for any social, religious, or ideological purposes or effects it might have. Despite its inventive character, though, literature has rarely been thought to serve only as entertainment or to give aesthetic pleasure alone. John Milton wrote Paradise Lost with the explicit agenda of justifying the ways of God to humanity, and his presentation of war in heaven had a political dimension as well, significantly inflected by his experiences with civil conflict in England. The poets Byron and Shelley advanced radical political views in works such as Don Juan and The Mask of Anarchy, and so would the Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht in the twentieth century. Even Oscar Wilde, who famously denied that art should serve any moral purpose, was advancing his aestheticist views in part to counter Victorian assumptions that artists should support their society's moral codes - including the heterosexual mores that would destroy Wilde's career and send him to jail for the crime of sodomy.

Outside Western Europe and North America, the strict separation of literature from political and religious writing rarely took hold to begin with. Mystical poetry continued to be written by Sufis in Persia and by bhakti poets in India, and throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it was taken as a given in many colonized societies that writers should be directly engaged in anticolonial struggle and then in the political debates of the ensuing postcolonial era. In the West itself, Kantian ideas of literature's purposelessness were challenged by Marxist, New Historicist, and postcolonial approaches that drew new attention to the political agendas of many western as well as nonwestern writers.

Within a given literary tradition, authors and readers build up a common fund of expectations as to how to read different kinds of composition, and experienced readers can approach a work with a shared sense of how to take it. Reviewers may praise a popular history of the French Revolution for being "as gripping as a novel," but we will still expect all the events in the book to be documented in sources that the historian has read and not made up. Conversely, the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges was famous for devising ficciones that often look like sober scholarly reports, but readers soon discover that unlikely or even impossible events are taking place, while many of Borges' "sources" are entirely invented and are themselves part of the fiction. On a middle ground, when we read a book billed as "a historical novel," we assume that it will adhere to the general outlines of a real sequence of events, but we allow the author to take major creative liberties in supplementing historical figures and events with invented characters and scenes.

Writers sometimes push the envelope through genre-bending experiments, and confusions can arise when we mistake a work's genre or an author's intention, as when Orson Welles broadcast his dramatization of The War of the Worlds and some listeners panicked at what they thought was a genuine news report of an alien invasion. Usually, though, within a given culture, a work fits broadly within a form whose rules an informed reader is expected to know, even as it may transform or actually subvert the form it employs. A lover of Petrarch and Shakespeare can approach Wordsworth's sonnets with a good sense of what a sonnet is (fourteen pentameter lines, typically composed in one of two dominant rhyme schemes, the "Petrarchan" and the "Shakespearean"). With this background, readers can then appreciate Wordsworth's creative use of this classic form and his distinctive departures from it, as when he varies the rhyme scheme for dramatic effect. We may no longer know the specific literary background of older texts, but often we will be familiar with more recent versions of the older tradition. Cervantes began Don Quixote as a satire on the knightly romances that were all the rage in his day in Spain and, although few readers today know the old tales of Amadis of Gaul or Tirant lo Blanc that Cervantes satirizes, many people will likely know the genre through...