Difference between revisions of "What is literature?"

Revision as of 19:54, 4 April 2007

The Landscape of Discourses until 1750/1850

• literature = learning, learned publications

• spectrum of materials: predominantly scholarly publications
• discussed in "histories of literature" and in journals reviewing latest events in the republic of learning
• geographical scope: competition of the nations
• historical scope: progress in learning and comparison of ancient and modern learning

• belles lettres = all fashionable and elegant pieces of learning including poetry, fiction

• spectrum of materials: all fashionable publications such as novels, poems, plays, memoirs, (scandalous) histories
• discussed mainly in prefaces to elegant works, exceptionally also in works of literature
• geographical scope: European market, main language French
• historical scope: comparison of ancient and modern elegance

• poetry/poesy = artful compositions of language - mainly versified

• spectrum of materials: poetic genres including prose comedy and all works performed with music as operas, cantatas, masks, ballets
• discussed in poetological works with a view on beauties of language and the observation of rules every art and genre has to follow
• geographical scope: mostly on the main languages of poetry: (due to Opera) Italian and French
• historical scope: search for the ultimate work in each language

• fiction = stories to be read for their instruction and entertainment even if they should be feigned

• spectrum of materials: romances = fictional prose histories of love and heroism presented in a series of adventures; novels = short stories related for the sake of the "point" they can "exemplarily" make, usually constructed around an intrigue leading to the surprising point
• interpreted - after Huet’s Treatise on the Origin of Romances (1670) - as a cultural indicator
• geographical scope: all cultures united by a world wide transmission of stories and fashions - great interest in foreign tastes
• historical scope: all periods - growing interest in fashions of the past

Period of Transition: 1750-1850

• The debate of learning adopts and approriates discussions of the belles lettres, poetry and fiction - yet

• it imposes a perspective on the nation (as the provider of the each literature's language)
• it focusses on the "poetic" genres (according to Aristotlian concepts - a measure excluding the international opera)
• it accepts a reformed novel as a "literary" genre as long as it can be read as a cultural indicator of "deeper significance" within the nation's cultural development (a step designed to exclude the European chronique scandaleuse)
• it develops new journals of a broader appeal devoted to the new debates
• it offers its expertise to the nation in a process in which literature can become a national topic to be taught at secularised schools
• it calls for authors to write works to be reviewed within the new debates of literature and thus
• it divides the preceding markets into

• a "high" segment of "literary" works - worthy to be analysed and discussed
• a mass market of materials not worthy to be taken notice of

• it deconceptualises the preceding debates of literature, the belles lettres, poetry and fiction

The Landscape of Discourses since the 1850s

• The sciences have developed their own specialised debates
• The general discussion of literature focusses on a small field of works which can, however, no longer be defined (due to fact that we can switch between all the debate we adopted whenever we want to discuss something as "literature")
• The question "What Is Literature" does thereby become a key question designed

• to format the national canon
• to keep materials out of our general debates of cultural phenomena
• to allow or delegitimize discussions we could adopt and appropriate in oder to spread or to limit the discussion of literature

Literature

• Roland Barthes. "Histoire ou Litérature?" in R. Barthes, Sur Racine (Paris, 1963), p.155, first published in Annales, 3 (1960).
• René Wellek. „Literature and its Cognates“, Dictionary of the History of Ideas. Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas 1-4, ed. Philip P. Wiener. New York, 1973, 3: p.81-89.
• Paul Hernadi (ed). What Is Literature?. London, 1978. ISBN 0-253-36505-8
• Jürgen Fohrmann. Projekt der deutschen Literaturgeschichte. Entstehung und Scheitern einer nationalen Poesiegeschichtsschreibung zwischen Humanismus und Deutschem Kaiserreich. Stuttgart, 1989. ISBN 3-476-00660-3
• Rainer Rosenberg. "Eine verworrene Geschichte. Vorüberlegungen zu einer Biographie des Literaturbegriffs", Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 77 (1990), 36-65.
• Richard Terry. "The Eighteenth-Century Invention of English Literature. A Truism Revisited", Journal for Eigtheenth Century Studies 19.1 (1996).
• Olaf Simons. Marteaus Europa oder Der Roman, bevor er Literatur wurde (Amsterdam/ Atlanta: Rodopi, 2001), p.85-94. ISBN 90-420-1226-9