What is Literature?

1. Literature is a deception, leading us away from the truth.

a. Platonism. Some versions of American Puritanism and, later, fundamentalist Christianity.

b. We do not read literature because it damages us morally and spiritually/

2. Literature is a revelation of a transcendent reality

a. Romanticism: Emerson, Wordsworth, Shelley

b. We read literature in order to be spiritually/psychically transformed.

3. Literature is the best that has been thought or felt.

a. Victorian writers (and with some significant modification modernism): Matthew Arnold, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W.E.B. DuBois.

b. We read literature in order to be improved as human beings. Literature can provide an avenue for a better ethical engagement with the world. Literature shapes and forms the citizenry.

4. Literature is a form of discourse.

a. Structuralism and some versions of post-structuralism: Barthes and, in a more politicized vein, Foucault.

b. We read not in order to be improved but in order to understand, especially to understand the manifold and tangled ways in which language operates.

5. Literature is ideological

a. Marxism, Feminism, other versions of political criticism understood as the “Hermeneutics of Suspicion.”: Eagleton, Achebe, Williams, Ohmann, Gilbert and Gubar, Gates

b. We read in order to uncover the ways in which literature supports unjust political and social arrangements.

6. Literature is an intervention

a. Various forms of ethnic and postcolonial criticism as well as feminism. Some versions of Marxism: Deleuze and Guatarri, Du Bois, Hurston, Achebe, Gilbert and Gubar, Cixous, Christian, Gates

b. We read in order to understand the way some literatures are seeking to subvert or otherwise rearrange unjust social systems.