Over my past years at school, I’ve studied “English Literature”, but in all that time, never have we discussed the most fundamental question upon which literature exists: what defines literature?
It is difficult to define literature based on specific criteria – seeing whether a literary work meets a list of certain requirements. Often people claim that literature is defined by personal interpretation – people can personally license something as literature if they “see” it that way, and can have their own approach to the text. Other times we listen to teachers and critics to tell us what is or isn’t literature.
Literature can act as a gateway from the past to the present. It can convey the image of different cultures, societies, eras, emotions and so on. It is a form of knowledge that can be passed down for generations, but unlike philosophy it does not question its own understanding. Instead it is unsystematic, and paradoxically, it strengthens our mental faculties, enabling us to better analyze the outer world, the realms of representation and reality, and our own introspection and intuition. We understand a fictional character’s emotions because we have, in some way or another, experienced similar impulses. We can identify sympathetically with something in literature beyond our own ken.
In my view, literature can only be defined subjectively because each reader experiences responses to a literary text that are unique from all others’, and has a different approach and interpretation of it.
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