Terry Eagleton explores various definitions of literature, emphasizing the complexities of what constitutes literary works and the influence of language and form. He highlights the weaknesses in each definition, arguing that literature cannot be objectively defined and is shaped by social ideologies and value judgments. Ultimately, Eagleton suggests that understanding literature requires an analysis that goes beyond mere definitions to consider its cultural roles and implications.

1. What is
Literature?
Terry Eagleton

2. First
Definition
“There have been various attempts to define literature.Youcan
can define it, for example, as 'imaginative' writing in the sense of
sense of fiction - writing which is not literally true.
But even the briefest reflection on what people commonly include

3. 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 wordsof the Russian critic Roman
Jakobson, represents an 'organized violence
committed on ordinary speech’. Literature
transforms and intensifies ordinary language,
deviates systematically from everyday speech.
SECOND
DEFINITION

4. Russian
Formalism
 The Russian Formalists of the early years of the twentieth century
stressed that critics should concern themselves with the literariness of
literature: the verbal strategies that make it literary, the foregrounding of
language itself, and the ‘making strange’ of experience that they
accomplish.
 Redirecting attention from authors to verbal ‘devices’, they claimed that
‘the device is the only hero of literature’.
 Roman Jakobson, Boris Eichenbaum, andVictor Shklovsky are three key
figures in this group which reoriented literary study towards questions
of form and technique.
 The credo of the early Russian Formalists was an extreme one: they
believed that the human emotions and ideas expressed in a work of
literature were of secondary concern and provided the context only for
the implementation of literary devices.

5. Terms and
Definitions
 Devices - included sound, imagery, rhythm,
syntax, meter, rhyme, narrative techniques, in fact
the whole stock of formal literary elements; and
what all of these elements had in common was
their 'estranging' or 'defamiliarizing’
 Defamiliarization - A concept employed by
Russian formalists, defamiliarization signifies the
attribute of some kinds of writing or other works
of art which communicates in non-transparent
ways that make the world seem strange. The
point of defamiliarization is that it shakes up
reading and writing habits, undercuts
conventional propriety in language and literature,
and thus prevents the reader from making merely
habitual or conventional responses.

6. On the one hand, there are occasions when a language/text with
'no inherent properties or qualities which might distinguish it
from other kinds of discourse' can be considered as literature.
On the other,not all ‘verbally flamboyant’ texts bear literariness
(paraphrased).
Another problem with the 'estrangement/defamiliarization' case
is that there is no kind of writing which cannot, given sufficient
ingenuity, be read as estranging. (Examples: In your own words; no
private reading; more than happy to do that—they display
ambiguities, thus can be read as estranging. Does that mean that
we can consider these examples as literature?).

7. The Formalists saw literary language as
a set of deviations from a norm, a kind
of linguistic violence: literature is a
'special' kind of language, in contrast to
the 'ordinary' language we commonly
use.
But to spot a deviation implies
being able to identify the norm
from which it swerves… The idea
that there is a single 'normal'
language, a common currency
shared equally by all members of
society, is an illusion… One
person's norm may be
another's deviation...

8. Third
Definition
Literature, then, we might say, is 'non-
pragmatic' discourse: it serves no
immediate practical purpose, but is to
be taken as referring to a general
state of affairs… This focusing on the
way of talking, rather than on the
reality of what is talked about, is
sometimes taken to indicate that we
mean by literature a kind of self-
referential language, a language
which talks about itself.

9. • There are, however, problems with this way of defining literature too... In much that
is classified as literature, the truth-value and practical relevance of what is said is
considered important to the overall effect.
• There is no 'essence' of literature whatsoever. Any bit of writing may be read 'non-
pragmatically', if that is what reading a text as literature means, just as any writing
may be read 'poetically'.
• But even if treating discourse 'nonpragmatically’ is part of what is meant by
'literature', then it follows from this 'definition' that literature cannot in fact be
'objectively' defined. It leaves the definition of literature up to how somebody
decides to read, not to the nature of what is written. There are certain kinds of
writing - poems, plays, novels - which are fairly obviously intended to be 'non-
pragmatic’ in this sense, but this does not guarantee that they will actually be read in
thisway.

10. Fourth
Definitio
n
• Those that are classified as
literature displays 'fine writing’.
• An obvious objection to this is that
if it were entirely true there would
be no such thing as 'bad literature'.

11. Fifth
Definition
John M. Ellis has argued that the term 'literature' operates rather
like the word 'weed': weeds are not particular kinds of plant, but
just any kind of plant which for some reason or another a gardener
does not want around. Perhaps 'literature' means something like
the opposite: any kind of writing which for some reason or
another somebody values highly.As the philosophers might say,
'literature' and ‘weed’ are functional rather than ontological terms:
they tell us about what we do, not about the fixed being of
things…'Literature' is in this sense a purely formal, empty sort
of definition.

12. Sixth
Definition
• One can think of literature less as some inherent quality or set of qualities displayed
by certain kinds of writing all the way from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf, than as a
number of waysin which people relatethemselves to writing.
• Anything can be literature, and anything which is regarded as unalterably and unquestionably
literature - Shakespeare, for example - can cease to be literature. Any belief that the study of
literature is the study of a stable, well- definable entity, as entomology is the study of insects,
can be abandoned as a chimera. Some kinds of fiction are literature and some are not; some
literature is fictional and some is not; some literature is verbally self-regarding, while some
highly-wrought rhetoric is not literature. Literature, in the sense of a set of works of assured
and unalterable value, distinguished by certain shared inherent properties, does not exist.

13. • An assessment of something as good or
bad in terms of one's standards or
priorities.
• 'Value' is a transitive term: it means
whatever is valued by certain people in
specific situations, according to particular
criteria and in the light of given purposes.
• All of our descriptive statements move
within an often invisible network of value-
categories, and indeed without such
categories we would have nothing to say to
each other at all.
Value-
judgements

14. IDEOLOGY
By 'ideology' I mean, roughly, the ways in which what we say and believe connects with the
power-structure and power-relations of the society we live in… I do not mean by 'ideology’
simply the deeply entrenched, often unconscious beliefs which people hold; I mean more
particularly those modes of feeling, valuing, perceiving and believing which have some
kind of relation to the maintenance and reproduction of social power. –Terry Eagleton
Broadly defined, a system of cultural assumptions, or the discursive concatenation of
beliefs or values which uphold or oppose social order,or which otherwise provide a
coherent structure of thought that hides or silences the contradictory elements in social
and economic formations.
Ideology is not simply a 'false consciousness', an illusory representation of
reality, it is rather this reality itself which is already to be conceived as
'ideological' - 'ideological' is a social reality whose very existence implies the
non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence - that is, the social
effectivity, the very reproduction of which implies that the individuals 'do not
know what they are doing'. 'Ideological' is not the ‘false consciousness' of a
(social) being but this being itself in so far as it is supported by false
‘consciousness’. –Slavoj Zizek

15. What we have uncovered so far,then, is not only that literature does not exist in
the sense that insects do, and that the value-judgements by which it is
constituted are historically variable, but that these value-judgements
themselves have a close relation to social ideologies.They refer in the end not
simply to private taste, but to the assumptions by which certain social groups
exercise and maintain power over others.

16. TO
SUMMARISE,
WE HAVE
LEARNED THAT:
THE
QUESTION
"WHAT IS
LITERATURE?“ ASKS
NOT FOR A
DEFINITION BUT
FOR AN ANALYSIS,
THUS IT BREEDS
OTHER QUESTIONS
SUCH AS: WHAT
SORT OF OBJECT OR
ACTIVITY IS IT?
WHAT DOES IT DO?
WHAT PURPOSE
DOES IT SERVE? TO
WHAT DO WE BASE
OUR DEFINITION OF
IT? WHAT IS
INVOLVED IN
TREATING THINGS
AS LITERATURE IN
OUR CULTURE? AND
SO ON.
THE AUTHOR,
TERRY EAGLETON,
EXAMINED
SEVERAL
DIFFERENT WAYS
OF DEFINING
LITERATURE. HE
POINTED OUT
REASONS FOR
EACH DEFINITION
TO BE WELL-
FOUNDED BUT
ALSO
HIGHLIGHTED
THEIR
WEAKNESSES
THROUGH
DIALECTICAL
REASONING.
THE TERM
'LITERATURE'
OPERATES
RATHER LIKE
THE WORD
'WEED'. IT IS IN
THIS SENSE A
PURELY FORMAL,
EMPTY SORT OF
DEFINITION.
LITERATURE IS
BOTH/NEITHER
AN OBJECTIVE
OR/NOR A
SUBJECTIVE
MATTER, IT IS
CONSTITUTED BY
VALUE-
JUDGEMENTS
WHICH ARE
DEEPLY ROOTED
IN SOCIAL
IDEOLOGIES.