What is Literature?
Literature is that which can be read, but is not what is known as “leisurely reading”. When one reads literature they can be taken on an adventure, they can be taught a lesson, they can learn, but really I believe it lies in the openness for interpretation. This is the main difference between what we call “literature” and any other writing. Literature speaks to us, it is universal, there is always something the author is trying to portray, some point they are getting across. Whether it is a universal message or a lesson, they teach the reader. It is a form of human expression, an art.
Take “The Death of Ivan Ilych” for example. Now compare that to say a romance novel you pick up on your way through the airport. Ivan Ilych is literature. Something taught in school, something with symbolism, and themes. Watching him waste away to his death we saw him brought to a revelation about himself. He realized that his actions in society did no good for anyone other than himself. It was shocking and yet gave him a peaceful ending. Walking away from reading that book you’re left pondering. You might think about reevaluating the way you live your life. You think and you don’t forget the book right away. The characters stay with you for a while, because they are easily relatable. Then on the other side we have the romance novel at the airport coffee shop. It’s usually the clichéd romance; quick and easy leisurely reading, to be done on one plane ride. When you finish it nothing resonates in you, you haven’t come away with a better sense of the world or yourself. It’s what is called “genre fiction” and it’s nice while you read it, but you forget it once you’re done. The characters have no real substance. The plot flows, but has no real meaning. It’s not literature.
Its not just prose writing either. Literature can also be poetry. Like Robert Frost and Sylvia Plath. Who decided they would be literature, which person got to include them in the school curriculum, and why? Because their poems have a depth that not everyone can comprehend. They need to be read over and over again by scholars, students, and artists. There isn’t one meaning, one interpretation. It all depends on the reader. One may see it as dreadfully depressing; one may view it as a sad story with an uplifting ending. Either way these readers are finding meaning in the poem, they are connecting with it in ways that you just can’t possibly do with some other poetry. An angsty teen falls in and out of love, a person sees a red bird sitting on a tree, and someone else tries to find a rhyme with orange. These aren’t literature because their meaning just barely scrapes the surface. There is no deep connection, no human expression that the author deemed important enough to convey to their readers.
Literature can be many things, and maybe it is all things. Who are we to decide what literature is unless we can get into the minds of all the writers in the world. I’m sure many of them sit down to write and have some theme or meaning they start with that might just not be apparent to us yet. But in the end, we are left reading what the scholars have called literature despite the fact there may be much more undiscovered “literature” out there.
