日课1 Literary Theory:An Introdution

By Terry Eagleton

Introdution:What is Literature(1)

If there is such a thing as literary theory, then it would seem obvious that there is something called literature which it is the theory of. We can begin, then, by raising the question: what is literature?

There have been various attempts to define literature. You can define it, for example, as ‘imaginative’ writing in the sense of fiction – writing which is not literally true. But then the briefest reflection on what people commonly include under the heading of literature suggests that this will not do. Seventeenth-century English literature includes Shakespeare, Webster, Marvell and Milton; but it also stretches to the essays of Francis Bacon, the sermons of John Donne, Bunyan’s spiritual autobiography and whatever it was that Sir Thomas Browne wrote. It might even at a pinch be taken to encompass Hobbes’s Leviathan or Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion. French seventeenth-century literature contains, along with Corneille and Racine, La Rochefoucauld’s maxims, Bossuet’s funeral speeches, Boileau’s treatise on poetry, Madame de Sévigné’s letters to her daughter and the philosophy of Descartes and Pascal. Nineteenth-century English literature usually includes Lamb(though not Bentham), Macaulay(but not Marx), Mill(but not Darwin or Herbert Spencer).

A distinction between 'fact' and "fiction", then, seems unlikely to get us very far, not least because the distinction itself is often a questionable one. It has been argued, for instance, that our own opposition between ‘historical’ and ‘artistic’ truth does not apply at all to early Icelandic sagas. In the English late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the word ‘novel’ seems to have been used about both true and fictional events, and even news reports were hardly to be considered factual. Novels and news reports were neither clearly factual nor clearly fictional: our own sharp discriminations between these categories simply did not apply. Gibbon no doubt thought that he was writing the historical truth, and so perhaps did the authors of Genesis, but they are now read as ‘fact’ by some and ‘fiction’ by others; Newman certainly thought his theological meditations were true but they are now for many readers ‘literature’. Moreover, if ‘literature’ includes much ‘factual’ writing, it also excludes quite a lot of fiction. Superman comic and Mills and Boon novels are fictional but not generally regarded as literature, and certainly not as Literature. If literature is ‘creative’ or ‘imaginative’ true, does this imply that history, philosophy and natural science are uncreative and unimaginative?

Perhaps one needs a different kind of approach altogether. Perhaps literature is definable not according to whether it is fictional or ‘imaginative’, but because it uses language in peculiar ways. On this theory, literature is a kind of writing which, in the words of Russian critic Roman Jakobson, represents an ‘organized violence committed on ordinary speech’. Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur ‘thou still unravished bride of quietness,’ then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary. I know this because the texture, rhythm and resonance of your words are in excess of their abstractable meaning-or, as the linguists might more technically put it, there is a disproportion between the signifiers and signifieds. Your language draw attention to itself, flaunts its material being, as statement like ‘Don’t you know the drivers are on strike?’ do not.