2. Jens Martensson
What is the function of Literature?
• Literature as a form of pleasure
1. Literature as a form of escape
2. Literature provides aesthetic satisfaction
• Literature as a form of
engagement
1. Literature provide away of interpreting the
world
2. Literature provides a way of transforming
the world
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3. Jens Martensson
Literature as a Form of Pleasure
Literature provides a form of escape
• It is related to the notion of literature as a substitute for life.
• Why do shell out money to buy books such as these? Why do
we like to curl up in bed with a good novel for company?
• Because now and then we want to escape from reality and to
get lost in the marvelous world of narratives. They want to forget
the demands of work or the many drudgeries of daily life.
• How is escape through literature made possible?
• Fiction writers are able to create an imaginary but believable
world. We enter the world of that novel, we accept the “truth”
that it presents, and identify with the reality that it embodies.
• Reading ‘for the fun of it’
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4. Jens Martensson
Literature as a Form of Pleasure
4
• Literature provides Aesthetic Satisfaction
• Our attention is now focused on form, technique, style.
• How often do you hear readers say: “What a wonderful book
this is! Its language is so beautiful!” or “I loved that monovel! It is
so well-written.” What are they talking about?
• They are talking about the manner, not the matter, of the work,
and how they take delight in the way the work has been
executed.
• People find pleasure in a well-constructed plot, vivid
characterization, unusual imagery, expressive language, poetic
rhythm, etc.. Literature is thus able to provide an unusual
pleasure that we cannot perhaps find in other artistic forms.
• Its most fundamental obligation is its obligation to literature as
art: before it tries to answer other requirements, it must first
satisfy the requirements of craft.
5. Jens Martensson
Literature as a Form of Engagement
5
• Let us consider the pronouncement from the French poet and Cubist
painter Guillaume Apollinaire:
It is the social function of great poets and artists to renew continually
the appearance nature has for the eyes of men.
Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of
nature’s monotony. The sublime idea which we find in nature, and
which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would
break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no
thought, no humanity; even life would give away, and the impotent
void would reign everywhere.
Poets and artists plot the characteristics of their epoch, and
the future docilely falls in with their desires. (Apollinaire, 1965:117)
• Literature provides a way of interpreting the world
6. Jens Martensson
Literature as a Form of Engagement
6
• Literature is not a mere duplication of reality but an ordered and significant
rendition of it.
• We therefore read literature not just for the fun of it but also for the
illumination that it provides as it allows us to see our world and our own
lives in coherent and meaningful terms.
• The reading of literature then is “an act of engagement and participation. It
is also, an act of clarification and discovery.
• Literature allows us the chance to overcome the limitations of our own
subjectivity and those limitations imposed by sex, age, social and economic
condition, and the times in which we live. (Pickering and Hoeper. 1981)
• Literature provides a way of interpreting the world
7. Jens Martensson
Literature as a Form of Engagement
7
• Have you heard of the expression “literature as a handmaiden of
society”?
• How can literature change society?
• Bertolt Brecht, a German playwright and one of the famous of
modern dramatists, has something to suffer us in this regard.
• The idea that literature provides a way of transforming the world
should therefore be seen in terms of what literature can do to affect
and move individuals who are after all the most dynamic agents of
change in society.
• Literature provides a way of transforming the world
Writers have
interpreted the
world in various
ways. The point
is however is to
change it.
8. Jens Martensson
Literature as a Form of Engagement
8
• When a work of literature functions successfully, the two ‘notes’ of
pleasure and utility should not merely coexist but coalesce.
• The pleasure of literature , we need to maintain, is not one
preference among a list of possible pleasures but is a higher
pleasure because pleasure in a higher kind of activity, non-
acquisitive contemplation.
• The utility- the seriousness, the instructiveness- of literature is a
pleasurable seriousness, not a seriousness of duty which must be
done or of a lesson to be learned but an aesthetic seriousness, a
seriousness of perception.
• Literature provides a way of transforming the world
Writers have
interpreted the
world in various
ways. The point
is however is to
change it.
