"What Is Art?" (excerpts) by Leo Tolstoy

This essay (originally published in 1896) and the translation by Alymer Maude (first published in 1899) are in the public domain and may be freely reproduced.

About the Author: Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), although best known for his literary works, also wrote various essays on art, history, and religion.

The discussion questions, bibliographic references, and hyperlinks have been added by Julie Van Camp. (Copyright Julie C. Van Camp 1997) They too may be freely reproduced, so long as this complete citation is included with any such reproductions.

Paragraph numbering below has been added to facilitate class discussion. It was not included in the original text.



CHAPTER FIVE (excerpts). . .

#1. In order correctly to define art, it is necessary, first of all, to cease to consider it as a means to pleasure and to consider it as one of the conditions of human life. Viewing it in this way we cannot fail to observe that art is one of the means of intercourse between man and man.

#2. Every work of art causes the receiver to enter into a certain kind of relationship both with him who produced, or is producing, the art, and with all those who, simultaneously, previously, or subsequently, receive the same artistic impression.

#3. Speech, transmitting the thoughts and experiences of men, serves as a means of union among them, and art acts in a similar manner. The peculiarity of this latter means of intercourse, distinguishing it from intercourse by means of words, consists in this, that whereas by words a man transmits his thoughts to another, by means of art he transmits his feelings.

#4. The activity of art is based on the fact that a man, receiving through his sense of hearing or sight another man's expression of feeling, is capable of experiencing the emotion which moved the man who expressed it. To take the simplest example; one man laughs, and another who hears becomes merry; or a man weeps, and another who hears feels sorrow. A man is excited or irritated, and another man seeing him comes to a similar state of mind. By his movements or by the sounds of his voice, a man expresses courage and determination or sadness and calmness, and this state of mind passes on to others. A man suffers, expressing his sufferings by groans and spasms, and this suffering transmits itself to other people; a man expresses his feeling of admiration, devotion, fear, respect, or love to certain objects, persons, or phenomena, and others are infected by the same feelings of admiration, devotion, fear, respect, or love to the same objects, persons, and phenomena.

#5. And it is upon this capacity of man to receive another man's expression of feeling and experience those feelings himself, that the activity of art is based.

#6. If a man infects another or others directly, immediately, by his appearance or by the sounds he gives vent to at the very time he experiences the feeling; if he causes another man to yawn when he himself cannot help yawning, or to laugh or cry when he himself is obliged to laugh or cry, or to suffer when he himself is suffering - that does not amount to art.

#7. Art begins when one person, with the object of joining another or others to himself in one and the same feeling, expresses that feeling by certain external indications. To take the simplest example: a boy, having experienced, let us say, fear on encountering a wolf, relates that encounter; and, in order to evoke in others the feeling he has experienced, describes himself, his condition before the encounter, the surroundings, the woods, his own lightheartedness, and then the wolf's appearance, its movements, the distance between himself and the wolf, etc. All this, if only the boy, when telling the story, again experiences the feelings he had lived through and infects the hearers and compels them to feel what the narrator had experienced is art. If even the boy had not seen a wolf but had frequently been afraid of one, and if, wishing to evoke in others the fear he had felt, he invented an encounter with a wolf and recounted it so as to make his hearers share the feelings he experienced when he feared the world, that also would be art. And just in the same way it is art if a man, having experienced either the fear of suffering or the attraction of enjoyment (whether in reality or in imagination) expresses these feelings on canvas or in marble so that others are infected by them. And it is also art if a man feels or imagines to himself feelings of delight, gladness, sorrow, despair, courage, or despondency and the transition from one to another of these feelings, and expresses these feelings by sounds so that the hearers are infected by them and experience them as they were experienced by the composer.

#8. The feelings with which the artist infects others may be most various - very strong or very weak, very important or very insignificant, very bad or very good: feelings of love for one's own country, self-devotion and submission to fate or to God expressed in a drama, raptures of lovers described in a novel, feelings of voluptuousness expressed in a picture, courage expressed in a triumphal march, merriment evoked by a dance, humor evoked by a funny story, the feeling of quietness transmitted by an evening landscape or by a lullaby, or the feeling of admiration evoked by a beautiful arabesque - it is all art.

#9. If only the spectators or auditors are infected by the feelings which the author has felt, it is art.

#10. To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then, by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling - this is the activity of art.

#11. Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them.

#12. Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man's emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity.

#13. As, thanks to man's capacity to express thoughts by words, every man may know all that has been done for him in the realms of thought by all humanity before his day, and can in the present, thanks to this capacity to understand the thoughts of others, become a sharer in their activity and can himself hand on to his contemporaries and descendants the thoughts he has assimilated from others, as well as those which have arisen within himself; so, thanks to man's capacity to be infected with the feelings of others by means of art, all that is being lived through by his contemporaries is accessible to him, as well as the feelings experienced by men thousands of years ago, and he has also the possibility of transmitting his own feelings to others.

#14. If people lacked this capacity to receive the thoughts conceived by the men who preceded them and to pass on to others their own thoughts, men would be like wild beasts, or like Kaspar Houser.

#15. And if men lacked this other capacity of being infected by art, people might be almost more savage still, and, above all, more separated from, and more hostile to, one another.

#16. And therefore the activity of art is a most important one, as important as the activity of speech itself and as generally diffused.

#17. We are accustomed to understand art to be only what we hear and see in theaters, concerts, and exhibitions, together with buildings, statues, poems, novels. . . . But all this is but the smallest part of the art by which we communicate with each other in life. All human life is filled with works of art of every kind - from cradlesong, jest, mimicry, the ornamentation of houses, dress, and utensils, up to church services, buildings, monuments, and triumphal processions. It is all artistic activity. So that by art, in the limited sense of the word, we do not mean all human activity transmitting feelings, but only that part which we for some reason select from it and to which we attach special importance.

#18. This special importance has always been given by all men to that part of this activity which transmits feelings flowing from their religious perception, and this small part of art they have specifically called art, attaching to it the full meaning of the word.

#19. That was how man of old -- Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle - looked on art. Thus did the Hebrew prophets and the ancient Christians regard art; thus it was, and still is, understood by the Mohammedans, and thus it still is understood by religious folk among our own peasantry.

#20. Some teachers of mankind - as Plato in his Republic and people such as the primitive Christians, the strict Mohammedans, and the Buddhists -- have gone so far as to repudiate all art.

#21. People viewing art in this way (in contradiction to the prevalent view of today which regards any art as good if only it affords pleasure) considered, and consider, that art (as contrasted with speech, which need not be listened to) is so highly dangerous in its power to infect people against their wills that mankind will lose far less by banishing all art than by tolerating each and every art.

#22. Evidently such people were wrong in repudiating all art, for they denied that which cannot be denied - one of the indispensable means of communication, without which mankind could not exist. But not less wrong are the people of civilized European society of our class and day in favoring any art if it but serves beauty, i.e., gives people pleasure.

#23. Formerly people feared lest among the works of art there might chance to be some causing corruption, and they prohibited art altogether. Now they only fear lest they should be deprived of any enjoyment art can afford, and patronize any art. And I think the last error is much grosser than the first and that its consequences are far more harmful.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

#24. Art, in our society, has been so perverted that not only has bad art come to be considered good, but even the very perception of what art really is has been lost. In order to be able to speak about the art of our society, it is, therefore, first of all necessary to distinguish art from counterfeit art.

#25. There is one indubitable indication distinguishing real art from its counterfeit, namely, the infectiousness of art. If a man, without exercising effort and without altering his standpoint on reading, hearing, or seeing another man's work, experiences a mental condition which unites him with that man and with other people who also partake of that work of art, then the object evoking that condition is a work of art. And however poetical, realistic, effectful, or interesting a work may be, it is not a work of art if it does not evoke that feeling (quite distinct from all other feelings) of joy and of spiritual union with another (the author) and with others (those who are also infected by it).

#26. It is true that this indication is an internal one, and that there are people who have forgotten what the action of real art is, who expect something else form art (in our society the great majority are in this state), and that therefore such people may mistake for this aesthetic feeling the feeling of diversion and a certain excitement which they receive from counterfeits of art. But though it is impossible to undeceive these people, just as it is impossible to convince a man suffering from "Daltonism" [a type of color blindness] that green is not red, yet, for all that, this indication remains perfectly definite to those whose feeling for art is neither perverted nor atrophied, and it clearly distinguishes the feeling produced by art from all other feelings.

#27. The chief peculiarity of this feeling is that the receiver of a true artistic impression is so united to the artist that he feels as if the work were his own and not someone else's - as if what it expresses were just what he had long been wishing to express. A real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between himself and the artist - not that alone, but also between himself and all whose minds receive this work of art. In this freeing of our personality from its separation and isolation, in this uniting of it with others, lies the chief characteristic and the great attractive force of art.

#28. If a man is infected by the author's condition of soul, if he feels this emotion and this union with others, then the object which has effected this is art; but if there be no such infection, if there be not this union with the author and with others who are moved by the same work - then it is not art. And not only is infection a sure sign of art, but the degree of infectiousness is also the sole measure of excellence in art.

#29. The stronger the infection, the better is the art as art, speaking now apart from its subject matter, i.e., not considering the quality of the feelings it transmits.

#30. And the degree of the infectiousness of art depends on three conditions:

1. On the greater or lesser individuality of the feeling transmitted;
2. on the greater or lesser clearness with which the feeling is transmitted;
3. on the sincerity of the artist, i.e., on the greater or lesser force with which the artist himself feels the emotion he transmits.

#31. The more individual the feeling transmitted the more strongly does it act on the receiver; the more individual the state of soul into which he is transferred, the more pleasure does the receiver obtain, and therefore the more readily and strongly does he join in it.

#32. The clearness of expression assists infection because the receiver, who mingles in consciousness with the author, is the better satisfied the more clearly the feeling is transmitted, which, as it seems to him, he has long known and felt, and for which he has only now found expression.

#33. But most of all is the degree of infectiousness of art increased by the degree of sincerity in the artist. As soon as the spectator, hearer, or reader feels that the artist is infected by his own production, and writes, sings, or plays for himself, and not merely to act on others, this mental condition of the artist infects the receiver; and contrariwise, as soon as the spectator, reader, or hearer feels that the author is not writing, singing, or playing for his own satisfaction - does not himself feel what he wishes to express - but is doing it for him, the receiver, a resistance immediately springs up, and the most individual and the newest feelings and the cleverest technique not only fail to produce any infection but actually repel.

#34. I have mentioned three conditions of contagiousness in art, but they may be all summed up into one, the last, sincerity, i.e., that the artist should be impelled by an inner need to express his feeling. That condition includes the first; for if the artist is sincere he will express the feeling as he experienced it. And as each man is different from everyone else, his feeling will be individual for everyone else; and the more individual it is - the more the artist has drawn it from the depths of his nature - the more sympathetic and sincere will it be. And this same sincerity will impel the artist to find a clear expression of the feeling which he wishes to transmit.

#35. Therefore this third condition - sincerity - is the most important of the three. It is always complied with in peasant art, and this explains why such art always acts so powerfully; but it is a condition almost entirely absent from our upper-class art, which is continually produced by artists actuated by personal aims of covetousness or vanity.

#36. Such are the three conditions which divide art from its counterfeits, and which also decide the quality of every work of art apart from its subject matter.

#37. The absence of any one of these conditions excludes a work form the category of art and relegates it to that of art's counterfeits. If the work does not transmit the artist's peculiarity of feeling and is therefore not individual, if it is unintelligibly expressed, or if it has not proceeded from the author's inner need for expression - it is not a work of art. If all these conditions are present, even in the smallest degree, then the work, even if a weak one, is yet a work of art.

#38. The presence in various degrees of these three conditions - individuality, clearness, and sincerity - decides the merit of a work of art as art, apart from subject matter. All works of art take rank of merit according to the degree in which they fulfill the first, the second, and the third of these conditions. In one the individuality of the feeling transmitted may predominate; in another, clearness of expression; in a third, sincerity; while a fourth may have sincerity and individuality but be deficient in clearness; a fifth, individuality and clearness but less sincerity; and so forth, in all possible degrees and combinations.

#39. Thus is art divided from that which is not art, and thus is the quality of art as art decided, independently of its subject matter, i.e., apart from whether the feelings it transmits are good or bad.

#40. But how are we to define good and bad art with reference to its subject matter?

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Tolstoy characterizes art in terms of the relationship of the observer/perceiver both to the artist and to others who perceive the work. What is the nature of that relationship?
2. He believes that art is an important condition of human life, as it is used to communicate human feelings or emotions. What are examples of this communication? Precisely how does this communication work, according to Tolstoy? What is needed for successful communication of emotions through art?
3. We communicate our feelings and emotions in ways other than art. What are examples of some of those other ways? What is unusual about the communication through art?
4. This artistic communication uses "external signs," according to Tolstoy (#11). What might be examples of these "signs." How are the "signs" used by artists different from, say, traffic signs or directional arrows in a public building? How is this "communication" with "external signs" different from "expression" with "external signs"? (#12)
5. Art is not about the production of "pleasure," Tolstoy claims. Use the "find" command on your browser (or word-processing program) to search for the passages where he refers to "pleasure." What does he seem to mean by "pleasure"? Is he consistent in these passages in his usage of "pleasure"? What does he seem so hostile to this as a way of understanding art?
6. Tolstoy lists several other proposals for understanding art that he rejects. (#12) Does his proposal seem more compelling than those he rejects? Why?
7. Tolstoy seems to accept a hierarchy in which there is "art" of everyday life and higher art imbued with religious perception (#17-18). Is this a plausible distinction? Is it consistent with distinctions you make? Does it explain the cultural importance of art?
8. Tolstoy discusses Plato's views on art (#19-23). What elements of Plato's view does he consider he? Does he agree with Plato on any of his views on art? With what does he disagree?
9. How does Tolstoy propose that we distinguish "real art" from "counterfeit art" (#24-28)? Is this a workable test? What problems do you see with it? Can you think of counter-examples that would challenge his view of how to make this distinction?
10. Tolstoy uses the test of infectiousness, not only as a descriptive measure for what should count as art, but also as a standard for good art (#28-32). What does he mean by this standard? How does he suggest we apply this test to evaluate art? Is this a useful proposal for evaluating the quality of art? If you disagree with this proposal, how would you challenge it?
11. How does "sincerity" function in Tolstoy's theory? Use the "find" command to consider all the passages where he refers to "sincerity." Is this a useful proposal for understanding and appreciating art? Can we ever be deceived about an artist's sincerity? How would Tolstoy respond to such a concern about deception?
12. Tolstoy values what he calls "peasant art" because of its sincerity (#35). Compare Tolstoy's discussion of "peasant art" with the praise by Clive Bell less than twenty years later of "primitive art" (Art, #16). Is their reasoning similar in any ways? How is it different? Do you think their praise of such art was coincidental?

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The Extrinsic Approach to The Study Of Literature

Introduction

There are some external points are discussed in study of literature. But setting and environment are more often discussed. Sometimes, the extrinsic study only connects the literature to the social context and the previous growth. In most cases, it becomes a ‘causal’ explanation, professing to account for literature, to explain it, and finally to reduce it to its origins (the ‘fallacy of origins’) (Wellek and Warren, 1977: 73).

Yet, it is clear that causal study can never dispose of problems of description, analysis, and evaluation of an object such as work of literary art. Cause and effect are incommensurate: the concrete result of these extrinsic causes –the work of art- is always unpredictable (Wellek and Warren, 1977: 73)


There are some opinions about the extrinsic factors influence the literary works such as the biography, psychology, social life, causal explanation of literature largely in such other collective creations, and some quintessential spirit of the time.

But either how far these factors determine the production process of literary works, or how far the extrinsic method supposed to be able in measuring the external influence, depends on the approach which is used. The scientist who uses the social approach tent to come to determine in straight. Their radicalism is the influence of positivism. This occurs to the proponents of geistegeschichte, which is combined with hegelianism and romanticism. Moreover, they are more radical than the scientists who use the social approach. On the other hand, there are some of scientists who are more modest. They do not depend only on one factor. The other factors may give effects as well.

LITERATURE AND BIOGRAPHY
Biography is only regarded that it is valuable if it gives any contribution to the making of literary works. From a biography, we will not only know the genius, moral, intellectual and emotional development of a man. Furthermore, we may learn the psychology condition and his creative process.

It is necessary to distinguish these three point of views. First, biography tells the student about the making of a literary works. Second, biography shifts the subject matter of the study to the works of an author. Third, biography is supposed to be a science of future science, the psychology of artistic creation.

Biography is a kind of work from a very ancient age. It was a part of historiography. Biography of a man, whatever his capacity, is always interesting if it is said honestly. From a biography writer’s point of view, moral and intellectual developments, external career and emotional life can be reconstructed and evaluated based on the ethical system or certain code of manners. A biography writer must reinterpret some documents, letters, accounts by eyewitness, reminiscences, and autobiographical statement. Beside that, he must decide which the original materials are and trustable eyewitnesses. The problem then may evoke in writing a biography is, first, the selection. Then, how a secret should be hidden.

When a biography has been arranged, two mayor questions address it. First, how far the biography writer uses the literature work for evidence? Then, how far a biography can be used to understand a literary work? These questions are usually answered that poetry can give some explanations about biography of its poet. Of course, this doesn’t work to the other owner of a biography who didn’t write a poem.

Poem may give some explanation about the biography of its poet. But, how does the biography writer write a biography of an author who is difficult to seek his story for his life? Meanwhile, usually only a series of public documents, birth registers, marriage certificates, lawsuits, and the like, and evidence of the works.

For example, to write Shakespeare biography, some scientists had ever applied different method. Caroline Spurgeon, used a scientific spirit. But she came to a long-list of trivial things in Shakespeare life. On the other hand, George Brandes and Frans Haris used the Shakespeare’s works as the material of their research. A biographical romance is as the result.

The biographical method proponents do not agree with such contention. They argue that it is necessary for us understand the different condition at that age compared with nowadays. For example, some authors such as Milton, Pope, Goethe, Wordsworth, and Byron were aware that they were well known. So, it is necessary for them to make a biographical statement, even arranged an autobiography.

In this context, it is important for us to divide the poets into two categories: objective and subjective. Those who, like Keats and T.S. Elliot, stress the poet’s “negative capability”, has openness to the world, the obliteration of his concrete personality, and the opposite type of the poet, who aims at displaying his personality, wants to draw a self-portrait, to confess, to express himself (Wellek and Warren, 1977: 77).

But even with the subjective poet, the distinction between a personal statement of an autobiographical nature and the use of the very same motif in a work of art should not and cannot be withdrawn. A work of art forms a unity on a quite different plane, with a unique different relation to reality, than a book of memoirs, a diary, or a letter (Wellek and Warren, 1977: 78)

The biographical method has some weakness. The biographical approach forgets that a work of art is not only simply the embodiment of experience but always the latest work in a series of such works; it is in drama, a novel, a poem determined, so far as it is determined at all, by literary tradition and conventions. The biographical approach actually obscures a proper comprehension of the literary process, since it breaks up the order of literary tradition to substitute the life-circle of an individual (Wellek and Warren, 1977: 78)

The biographical approach ignores also quite simple psychological facts. A work of art may be the ‘mask’, the ‘anti-self’ behind which his real person is hiding, or it may be a picture of the life from which the author wants to escape (Wellek and Warren, 1977: 78). Simply we can sum up that there is a parallelism between the author and the characters in his works.

LITERATURE AND PSYCHOLOGY
There are four possible definitions about psychology of literature: psychological study of the writer, as type and as individual, or the study of the creative process, or the study of the psychological types and laws present within works of literature, or, finally, the effects of literature upon its readers (audience psychology) (Wellek and Warren, 1977: 81). But the third definition is the only one which is strongly related with the study.

Some theorists had ever theorized about the successful of an author. First, the most decided the successful of an author is his literary genius. Some others said that the successful of an author depended on his physical appearance. The rests argued that emotional disorders and compensatory distinguished the artists, scientists, and other ‘contemplatives’.

Two mayor questions then may evoke. First, if an emotional disorder occurs to an author, does it become the theme of his works, or motivation to create a work? (If it is only a motivation for him to create a work, it occurs to other scientists as well.) Second, if the theme of a literary work is neurotic, how should a reader understand it?

Freud’s view about an author is inconsistent. Freud, Jung, and Frank are civilized people. They were well educated in Austria and respected the classical works of Greeks and German literature. Freud himself found his works were almost same with Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Kamarazov, in Hamlet, in Diderot’s Neveu de Rameau, in Goethe. According to him, the author as an obdurate neurotic who, by his creative work, kept himself a crack-up but also from any real cure. The poet, that is, is a day-dreamer who socially validated (Wellek and Warren, 1977: 82).

Such an account presumably disposes of the philosopher and ‘the pure scientist’ along with the artists, and is, therefore, a kind of positivist, ‘reduction’ of contemplative activity to an observing and naming instead of acting (Wellek and Warren, 1977: 82). This limit, however, merely describes the indirect effect of literary works, that is “alterations in the outer world”.
The theory of art as a neurosis leads to a new problem that is the relation between the imagination and belief. The artists keep felling and seeing his own though. Beside that, it is common for them to combine two kinds of imagery. For example, audition coloree: the trumpet as scarlet.

T.S Elliot had argued his views about a poet since his writing. Over there, he said that a poet is supposed to repeat and keep his relation with his childhood meanwhile he is running to the future. Then, in 1918, he wrote that a poet “is more primitive, as well as more civilized, than his contemporaries …”. In 1932, he repeated this conception, especially about “auditory imagination” but also of the poet’s visual imagery, and especially his recurrent images, which “may have symbolic value, but of what we cannot tell, for they have come to represent the depths felling into which we cannot peer” (Wellek and Warren, 1977: 84). Then he concluded that “the pre-logical mentality persists in civilized man, but becomes available only to or through the poet (Wellek and Warren, 1977: 84).

Jung made a complicated typological psychology. There are two categories: extrovert and introvert. These categories, then, divided into four types based on the strength of thinking, feeling, intuition, and sensation. But, surprisingly, Jung did not categorize all of the authors to certain types. He remarks that some writers reveal their type in their creative work, while others reveal their anti-type, their complement (Wellek and Warren, 1977: 84).

Nietzsche, in his The Birth of Tragedy (1872) proposed two polarities of art. They were classical “maker” and romantic “possessed”. Nietzsche theorized this according to Apollo and Dionysos, two gods of arts in Greeks myths.

This influenced Ribot, a French psychologist, much. He divided the artists into “plastic” and “diffluent”. A “plastic” artist can make a very rigid visualization, even if he is stimulated. Meanwhile the “diffluent” artist begins his imagination from his emotion or feeling then reveals it. He is helped by “stimmung” from inside of himself.

Then L. Rusu, a contemporary Rumanian scholar, distinguished three basic types of artists: “type sympatique”, “type demoniaque anarchique” and the “type demoniaque equilibre”. The second type is the anti-thesis of the first type. The rest is claimed to be the greatest type, at the end of the quarrel against the battle, the balance occurs.

The “creative process” should cover the entire sequence from the subconscious origins of a literary work to those last revisions which, with some writers, are the most genuinely creative part of the whole (Wellek and Warren, 1977: 85). The structure of a poet’s mental is different from a form of a poem. Impression is different from expression.

“Inspiration” is a traditional name for the unconscious factor in creation, is classically associated with the Muses, the daughters of memory, and in Christian thought with the Holy Spirit. Creative habits are assuredly are, as well as stimulants and rituals. Alcohol, opium, and other drugs dull the conscious mind, the over-critical ‘censor’, and release the activity of the subconscious (Wellek and Warren, 1977: 86).

Then, do the way and technical of writing influence the style of writing? Hemingway said that the typewriter “solidifies one’s sentence before they are ready to print.” Then, the others in commented that the using of a typewriter leads to a work in journalistic style. Milton himself knew by heart his Paradise Lost and dictated it. Even, Scott, Goethe, and Henry James had prepared their works. They dictated it and other people wrote it.

The discussion about the creative process in creation must have talked about the unconscious world. It is easy for us to compare the romantic and expressionistic periods exaggerate the unconscious world to the classic and realistic proposed the intelligence, communication, and the text revision.

We have to make two kinds of tests if we want to seek literary talents. The first test is proposed to see a poet talent. The second test is to see the narrative writer. A poet is associated with symbols, meanwhile a narrative writer with the creation of character in a story.

Our discussion above is about the psychology of the writers. Their creative process is the scope of psychologists’ investigative curiosity. Then, can we use psychology to interpret and judge a literary work? Psychology, as we have discussed above, can explain about the creative process. A study of revisions, corrections, and the like has more which is literarily profitable, since, well used, it may help us perceive critically relevant fissures, inconsistencies, turnings, distortions, in a work of art (Wellek and Warren, 1977: 91).

The last question is psychology itself in literary work. A character may be right psychologically. But, does it have any artistic value? The knowledge of psychological truth is needed, sometimes. But it is not too necessary for art because psychological truth does not have any artistic value.ar
For some conscious artists, psychology may have tightened their sense of reality, sharpened their powers of observation or allowed them to fall into hithero undiscovered patterns. But, in itself, psychology is only preparatory to the act of creation; and in the work itself, psychological truth is an artistic value only if it enhances coherence and complexity –if, in short, it is an art (Wellek and Warren, 1977: 93).

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This article is writen by Leny Nuzuliyanti, a student of English Literature Department of Diponegoro University, Semarang, Central Java,Indonesia.

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Social Construction of Reality

Something very peculiar occured to some members of Europe's educated classes around the beginning of the Renaissance: they read the ancients and realized the past was different from the present. Not just in the obvious, trivial sense that that was then and this is now, but that in antiquity they had talked differently, acted differently, lived differently, even thought differently. This was rather a shock; one can see it reflected in, say, Machiavelli, as he explains why the ancient polities simply cannot be revived. This realization, that "they do things differently there," did not go away; it only acquired more force and a broader scope as the "discovery of the historical world" (Cassirer) progressed along-side contact with other cultures. (Islam had of course been next door to Europe, even in Europe, for centuries, but it shared an Abrahamic religion and Hellenistic philosophy, and each side could condemn the other as deviants from the True Faith. This resource was unavailable to the Jesuits when they got to Kerala and China.) So far this was just an uneasy awareness that we can be led into error by the customs of our country (to try to keep to the language of the time), and that, if we want to avoid such errors, we need to carefully scrutinize those customs and received notions. (Thus Descartes at the start of the Discourse on Method.)

It took another peculiar event to change the fear of inherited errors into a positive doctrine; that was the Great French Revolution of 1789, or more precisely the conservative response to it. The basic point made by, for instance, Edmund Burke, was that it was neither possible nor desirable to start from scratch, from tabulæ rasæ, as (according to the conservatives) the philosophes and the revolutionaries had tried to do. We are, after all, not blank slates, we do not evolve our thought out of pure abstraction, but inherit our modes of thought and categories from our ancestors; our intellect as much as our institutions and our feelings are part of a vast social fabric, stretching back into a literally immemorial past. So we can't start from stratch; but we can modify our inheritance. Yet (the conservative argument continues) that inheritance is the product of millennia of sifting and winnowing; however imperfect it may be, it has in fact endured and worked for a very long time, and as such is not to be lightly tampered with, much less completely rejected in favor of very recent and very speculative, hence very uncertain, substitutes, especially not when serious matters of human life and happiness are at stake. (The contrast between this sort of conservativism, and the doctrinaire radicalism of Thatcher, the Reagan administration and Gingrich, is most instructive.)

I have a lot of sympathy for this line of argument, certainly as it applies to politics, though I think conservatives generally unfair to the Enlightenment, but that's a side-issue for the moment. The important point, for our present purposes, is the notion of that thought is social, is traditional, most especially that the categories we employ in thinking are social, inherited, traditional. Add to this the idea that our concepts form a closed, coherent system, from which there is no (rational) escape. Result: The terms in which we thinks are fixed by society; the very effort to condemn or escape our society and its conventions, even in thought, is sabotaged from the start. Add one more belief, that we never have an unmediated contact with reality, that all we know are (socially-approved) representations, and the circle is complete. "Reality" as such, independent of all ideas, concepts, modes of representation, etc. inherited from our past, is nothing to us. What we have is (allowing for the barbarization of learned prose since Burke's day) a social construct; reality, as we know it, is socially constructed. Radical challenges to the status quo are thus, quite literally, unthinkable and unrealistic.

The phrase, "social construction of reality," was in fact brought into general use, if not invented, by a book of the same title by a pair of conservative sociologists, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann. (They do not give the argument in quite this form, but I think mine is a neater derivation.) It's very curious that the idea has been taken up so enthusiastically by academics who pride themselves on being leftists and radicals. (Though not without precedent; much of Marx's work is an attempt to expropriate the original conservative arguments.) Their reasoning seems to run roughly as follows. Many (if not all) oppressed people are thought of in an invidious, demeaning, repressive way; if we teach people to think in different categories, we'll get rid of those kinds of oppression. But this presumes that we can change the system of concepts, and in a deliberately chosen way at that, which blocks the premises we started from. In any case, Marx and Engels knew all about this kind of optimism a hundred and fifty years ago:

Once upon a time a valiant fellow had the idea that men were drowned in water only because they were possessed with the idea of gravity. If they were to knock this notion out of their heads, say by stating it to be a superstition, a religious concept, they would be sublimely proof against any danger from water. His whole life long he fought against the illusion of gravity, of whose harmful results all statistics brought him new and manifold evidence. This honest fellow was the type of the new revolutionary philosophers in Germany. [The German Ideology, preface.]

Of course, today it's not just "in Germany"...

This is a reductio, so let's see where the reasoning went wrong.

In the first place, let's start with this idea of "society." It's a pretty harmless one, and an invaluable short-hand, but here it leads us into mistakes. We do not, pace Durkheim, ever actually deal with society; we deal with other people --- our parents, our playmates, our bosses, our enemies, our spawn, etc., etc. It's certainly true that we acquire many concepts, ideas and ways of thinking from these people, through formal instruction, through shared experience, through conversation and conviviality, and through direct imitation, but it by no means follows that we acquire a coherent system of thought from them, much less that we all share the same system by virtue of getting in each other's hair. This doesn't make it impossible to talk about (e.g.) which conceptions are common in a certain population, but it does or should warn us against laying out elaborate conceptual systems and saying "This is what the English aristocracy thought in 1900" or the like.

More: I spoke above as though the social origin of ideas meant that they form a closed, self-consistent and self-supporting system, a vicious (or, if you like it, virtuous) circle. But there's no a priori reason to suppose this is so, and certainly not much evidence. Variation from established concepts is common; useful variants, alas, are rare. (As one of my biology professors put it: "Most errors don't work.") This modification of ideas from within can even be a perfectly rational process, as, for instance, Toulmin shows. Nor does the fact (if it is true) that we can't grab hold of reality unmediated by some form of representation show that we can't use experience to weed out ideas and methods which work poorly; even that we can't use experience to change our forms of representation.

That said, I'm far from wanting to dismiss the idea totally. We do acquire many ideas from others, and it's a damn good thing too: it's what makes intellectual progress possible ("shoulders of giants" and all that). For people to share a certain concept, they must at the very least agree on when to apply it, at least roughly. But some of our concepts seem to have nothing more to recommend them than such consensus. Probably the most important such categories, at least in modern America, are those of race. (Personal anecdote: In most of the US, despite the fact that we have the same biological parents, I'm classified as white but my brother is not. Here in New Mexico, since we're neither Spanish nor Native American, we're both Anglos.) At the beginning of this century, many, perhaps most WASPs regarded the Irish, let alone the Italians, the Poles and the Jews as belonging to a different race; by the middle of the next century, I expect that "white" will have come to include people of East Asian descent, and probably changed its name. Moreover, whether a new idea, or a new variation of an old one, becomes entrenched in a population is a social process; but that's not the social construction of reality, that's the social selection of beliefs and practices, a far weaker and more reasonable notion, which can still do the good works which attract people to its impossibly strong cousin.

I also expect that the doctrine of social construction will go from strength to strength. True, at the moment it's tied up with some pretty fru-fru sorts of leftism, which limits its reach, but that's an unstable, unnatural combination. We leftists want to say that oppression is wrong, unjustified and rest on false premises. But if social construction holds, what counts as right, justified and even true is set by society, and ultimately by the powers that be within it, i.e., the very people we're struggling against. Turned around, of course, this makes a splendid argument for the status quo: dissent is, automatically, inescapably nonsensical. Wait a few decades for the people being educated in social constructivism to grow up and get with the strength, and watch this argument fill up the journals.

Recommended:
• Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge
• Peter Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past
• Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? [Deserves a full review, which will take me a little while at least]
• Richard F. Hamilton, The Social Misconstruction of Reality: Validity and Verification in the Scholarly Community
• Robert K. Merton, On the Shoulders of Giants
• Bruce Sterling, Zeitgeist: A Novel of Metamorphosis [This is science fiction: an alternate world where reality really is socially constructed, all the way down, with hilarious side-effects.]
• Stephen Toulmin, Human Understanding, vol. I: The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts.
• Stephen Turner, The Social Theory of Practices: Tradition, Tacit Knowledge, and Presuppositions

To read:
• Kenneth Gergen, An Invitation to Social Construction
• Eric Heubeck, The Integration of Theory and Practice: A Program for the New Traditionalist Movement ["The truth of an idea is not the primary reason for its acceptance"]
• John Shotter, Cultural Politics of Everyday Life: Social Constructionism, Rhetoric and Knowing of the Third Kind

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What is Literary Criticism?

Literary criticism is the study, discussion, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often informed by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of its methods and goals. Though the two activities are closely related, literary critics are not always, and have not always been, theorists.

Whether or not literary criticism should be considered a separate field of inquiry from literary theory, or conversely from book reviewing, is a matter of some controversy. For example, the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism draws no distinction between literary theory and literary criticism, and almost always uses them together to describe the same concept. Some critics consider literary criticism a practical application of literary theory, as criticism always deals directly with a literary work, albeit from a theoretical point of view.

Modern literary criticism is often published in essay or book form. Academic literary critics teach in literature departments and publish in academic journals, and more popular critics publish their criticism in broadly circulating periodicals such as the New York Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, The Nation, and The New Yorker.

History of literary criticism

Classical and medieval criticism

Literary criticism has probably existed for as long as literature. Aristotle wrote the Poetics, a typology and description of literary forms with many specific criticisms of contemporary works of art, in the 4th century BC. Poetics developed for the first time the concepts of mimesis and catharsis, which are still crucial in literary study. Plato's attacks on poetry as imitative, secondary, and false were formative as well.

Later classical and medieval criticism often focused on religious texts, and the several long religious traditions of hermeneutics and textual exegesis have had a profound influence on the study of secular texts.

Renaissance criticism

The literary criticism of the Renaissance developed classical ideas of unity of form and content into literary neoclassicism, proclaiming literature as central to culture, entrusting the poet and the author with preservation of a long literary tradition. The birth of Renaissance criticism was in 1498, with the recovery of classic texts, most notably, Giorgio Valla's Latin translation of Aristotle's Poetics. The work of Aristotle, especially Poetics, was the most important influence upon literary criticism until the latter eighteenth century. Lodovico Castelvetro was one of the most influential Renaissance critics who wrote commentaries on Aristotle's Poetics in 1570.

19th-century criticism

The British Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century introduced new aesthetic ideas to literary study, including the idea that the object of literature need not always be beautiful, noble, or perfect, but that literature itself could elevate a common subject to the level of the sublime. German Romanticism, which followed closely after the late development of German classicism, emphasized an aesthetic of fragmentation that can appear startlingly modern to the reader of English literature, and valued Witz – that is, "wit" or "humor" of a certain sort – more highly than the serious Anglophone Romanticism. The late nineteenth century brought reknown to authors known more for critical writing than for their own literary work, such as Matthew Arnold.

The New Criticism

However important all of these aesthetic movements were as antecedents, current ideas about literary criticism derive almost entirely from the new direction taken in the early twentieth century. Early in the century the school of criticism known as Russian Formalism, and slightly later the New Criticism in Britain and America, came to dominate the study and discussion of literature. Both schools emphasized the close reading of texts, elevating it far above generalizing discussion and speculation about either authorial intention (to say nothing of the author's psychology or biography, which became almost taboo subjects) or reader response. This emphasis on form and precise attention to "the words themselves" has persisted, after the decline of these critical doctrines themselves.

Mikhail Bakhtin introduced the concepts of heteroglossia, dialogism and chronotope, making a significant contribution to the realm of literary scholarship (Holquist xxvi).

Theory

In the British and American literary establishment, the New Criticism was more or less dominant until the late 1960s. Around that time Anglo-American university literature departments began to witness a rise of a more explicitly philosophical literary theory, influenced by structuralism, then post-structuralism, and other kinds of Continental philosophy. It continued until the mid-1980s, when interest in "theory" peaked. Many later critics, though undoubtedly still influenced by theoretical work, have been comfortable simply interpreting literature rather than writing explicitly about methodology and philosophical presumptions.

History of the Book

Related to other forms of literary criticism, the history of the book is a field of interdisciplinary enquiry drawing on the methods of bibliography, cultural history, history of literature, and media theory. Principally concerned with the production, circulation, and reception of texts and their material forms, book history seeks to connect forms of textuality with their material aspects.

Among the issues within the history of literature with which book history can be seen to intersect are: the development of authorship as a profession, the formation of reading audiences, the constraints of censorship and copyright, and the economics of literary form.

The current state of literary criticism

Today interest in literary theory and Continental philosophy coexists in university literature departments with a more conservative literary criticism of which the New Critics would probably have approved. Acrimonious disagreements over the goals and methods of literary criticism, which characterized both sides taken by critics during the "rise" of theory, have declined (though they still happen), and many critics feel that they now have a great plurality of methods and approaches from which to choose.

Some critics work largely with theoretical texts, while others read traditional literature; interest in the literary canon is still great, but many critics are also interested in minority and women's literatures, while some critics influenced by cultural studies read popular texts like comic books or pulp/genre fiction. Ecocritics have drawn connections between literature and the natural sciences. Many literary critics also work in film criticism or media studies. Some write intellectual history; others bring the results and methods of social history to bear on reading literature.

Bibliography

• Habib, M.A.R. A History of Literary Criticism: From Plato to the Present.ISBN 0-631-23200-1
• Encyclopedia of literary critics and criticism, ed. by Chris Murray, London [etc.] : Fitzroy Dearborn, 1999
• Holquist, Michael. Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World, Second Edition. Routledge, 2002.
• Holquist, Michael. “Introduction.” Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. By Mikhail Bakhtin. Eds. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986. ix-xxiii.
• Holquist, Michael. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. By Mikhail Bakhtin. Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1981.

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The difference between Literary Theory and Literature

Literary theory is the theory (or the philosophy) of the interpretation of literature and literary criticism. Its history begins with classical Greek poetics and rhetoric and includes, since the 18th century, aesthetics and hermeneutics. In the 20th century, "theory" has become an umbrella term for a variety of scholarly approaches to reading texts, most of which are informed by various strands of Continental philosophy.

Literary theory and literature

One of the fundamental questions of literary theory is "What is literature?", though many contemporary theorists and literary scholars believe either that "literature" cannot be defined or that it can refer to any use of language. Specific theories are distinguished not only by their methods and conclusions, but even by how they define a "text." For some scholars of literature, "texts" comprises little more than "books belonging to the Western literary canon." But the principles and methods of literary theory have been applied to non-fiction, popular fiction, film, historical documents, law, advertising, etc., in the related field of cultural studies. In fact, some scholars within cultural studies treat cultural events, like fashion or football riots, as "texts" to be interpreted. By this measure, literary theory can be thought of as the general theory of interpretation.

Since theorists of literature often draw on a very heterogeneous tradition of Continental philosophy and the philosophy of language, any classification of their approaches is only an approximation. There are many "schools" or types of literary theory, which take different approaches to understanding texts. Most theorists, even among those listed below, combine methods from more than one of these approaches (for instance, the deconstructive approach of Paul de Man drew on a long tradition of close reading pioneered by the New Critics, and de Man was trained in the European hermeneutic tradition).

Broad schools of theory that have historically been important include the New Criticism, formalism, Russian formalism, and structuralism, post-structuralism, Marxism, feminism and French feminism, new historicism, deconstruction, reader-response criticism, and psychoanalytic criticism.

History

The practice of literary theory became a profession in the 20th century, but it has historical roots that run as far back as ancient Greece (Aristotle's Poetics is an often cited early example) and ancient Rome (Longinus' On the Sublime and Horace's Ars Poetica), and the aesthetic theories of philosophers from ancient philosophy through the 18th and 19th centuries are important influences on current literary study. The theory and criticism of literature are, of course, also closely tied to the history of literature.

The modern sense of "literary theory," however, dates only to approximately the 1950s, when the structuralist linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure began strongly to influence English language literary criticism. The New Critics and various European-influenced formalists (particularly the Russian Formalists) had described some of their more abstract efforts as "theoretical" as well. But it was not until the broad impact of structuralism began to be felt in the English-speaking academic world that "literary theory" was thought of as a unified domain.

In the academic world of the United Kingdom and the United States, literary theory was at its most popular from the late 1960s (when its influence was beginning to spread outward from elite universities like Johns Hopkins and Yale) through the 1980s (by which time it was taught nearly everywhere in some form). During this span of time, literary theory was perceived as academically cutting-edge research, and most university literature departments sought to teach and study theory and incorporate it into their curricula. Because of its meteoric rise in popularity and the difficult language of its key texts, theory was also often criticized as faddish or trendy obscurantism (and many academic satire novels of the period, such as those by David Lodge, feature theory prominently). Some scholars, both theoretical and anti-theoretical, refer to the 1970s and 1980s debates on the academic merits of theory as "the theory wars."

By the early 1990s, the popularity of "theory" as a subject of interest by itself was declining slightly (along with job openings for pure "theorists") even as the texts of literary theory were incorporated into the study of almost all literature. As of 2004, the controversy over the use of theory in literary studies has all but died out, and discussions on the topic within literary and cultural studies tend now to be considerably milder and less acrimonious (though the appearance of volumes such as Theory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent, edited by Daphne Patai with Will H. Corral, may signal a resurgence of the controversy). Some scholars draw heavily on theory in their work, while others only mention it in passing or not at all; but it is an acknowledged, important part of the study of literature.

Differences among schools

The intellectual traditions and priorities of the various kinds of literary theory are often radically different. Even finding a set of common terms to compare them by can be difficult.

For instance, the work of the New Critics often contained an implicit moral dimension, and sometimes even a religious one: a New Critic might read a poem by T.S. Eliot or Gerard Manley Hopkins for its degree of honesty in expressing the torment and contradiction of a serious search for belief in the modern world. Meanwhile a Marxist critic might find such judgments merely ideological rather than critical; the Marxist would say that the New Critical reading did not keep enough critical distance from the poem's religious stance to be able to understand it. Or a post-structuralist critic might simply avoid the issue by understanding the religious meaning of a poem as an allegory of meaning, treating the poem's references to "God" by discussing their referential nature rather than what they refer to.

Such a disagreement cannot be easily resolved, because it is inherent in the radically different terms and goals (that is, the theories) of the critics. Their theories of reading derive from vastly different intellectual traditions: the New Critic bases his work on an East-Coast American scholarly and religious tradition, while the Marxist derives his thought from a body of critical social and economic thought, and the post-structuralist's work emerges from twentieth-century Continental philosophy of language. To expect such different approaches to have much in common would be naïve; so calling them all "theories of literature" without acknowledging their heterogeneity is itself a reduction of their differences.

In the late 1950s, Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye attempted to establish an approach for reconciling historical criticism and New Criticism while addressing concerns of early reader-response and numerous psychological and social approaches. His approach, laid out in his Anatomy of Criticism, was explicitly structuralist, relying on the assumption of an intertextual "order of words" and universality of certain structural types. His approach held sway in English literature programs for several decades but lost favor during the ascendence of post-structuralism.

For some theories of literature (especially certain kinds of formalism), the distinction between 'literary' and other sorts of texts is of paramount importance. Other schools (particularly post-structuralism in its various forms: new historicism, deconstruction, some strains of Marxism and feminism) have sought to break down distinctions between the two and have applied the tools of textual interpretation to a wide range of 'texts', including film, non-fiction, historical writing, and even cultural events.

Bakhtin argued that the "utter inadequacy" of literary theory is evident when it forced to deal with the novel; other genres are intact already stabilized while the novel is still young and developing.^[1]

Another crucial distinction among the various theories of literary interpretation is intentionality, the amount of weight given to the author's own opinions about and intentions for a work. For most pre-20th century approaches, the author's intentions are a guiding factor and an important determiner of the 'correct' interpretation of texts. The New Criticism was the first school to disavow the role of the author in interpreting texts, preferring to focus on "the text itself" in a close reading. In fact, as much contention as there is between formalism and later schools, they share the tenet that the author's interpretation of a work is no more inherently meaningful than any other.

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Understanding Literature

More than two thousand years ago, the Roman poet Horace claimed that literature is "sweet" and "useful." Since then, literature has been traditionally understood, at least in Western cultures, as having the dual purpose of entertaining and educating its audience. Literary texts are constructed in effect as objects of beauty, sources of pleasure and as conveyors of messages and information. While authors often claim no practical purpose for their works, all literature constitutes an attempt at persuasively conveying certain values and ideas. The entertaining and beautiful aspect of literary works acts in reality as part of the appeal and attractiveness which the work tries to attach to the ideas which it seeks to convey. The beauty of literature is therefore a part of its rhetoric, a device intended to strengthen the overall persuasiveness and influence of the work on its audience. While the entertaining aspect of literature may be rather obvious, understanding the ideas or values which a text advances is not always a simple task. Part of the problem is the fact that the ideas of a literary text are almost always presented in indirect or "symbolic" form. Take for example the following very simple narrative:

In itself an amusing story, we know nevertheless that one of the purposes of this fable of Aesop--a Greek storyteller of the 6th century B. C.--is to teach a point about the dangers of greed and the importance of being happy with what we have. Although those points are not literally or explicitly made in the story, they are embedded in its symbolism. In this story, the animal and his actions are not to be taken literally but instead are to be understood as symbolic representations of certain kinds of human character and behavior. An important guide in literary study is the idea that one must always strive to go beyond the literal or the mere appearances of things and search instead for the "meat" of the story. Unlike the dog of Aesop's fable, we should not allow ourselves to be fooled by false appearances. In the reading you will do in this course, you will be engaging in a constant search for the ideas and values which, although often not explicitly mentioned in the texts, constitute the substance of literary works.

The fact that literary texts very much seek to convey a message to their audience does not mean that their authors are always fully aware of or even interested in that function of their work. Authors in effect often craft their works in very practical and almost automatic ways and do not bother asking or answering questions as to their significance. What seems most important to authors is to create a pleasing or beautiful object which somehow closely conforms to and expresses the features of an otherwise undefined inward impulse. Many authors in fact are quite hostile toward the interpretation of their works and refuse to have anything to do with it. Samuel Beckett is quoted as having said, "it's bad enough to have to write these books without talking about them too." To begin to understand this odd relation of literature to its authors, we may recall its analogy, noted by Sigmund Freud, to the relation between dreams and dreamers. Just as dreams often convey meaning and information to the dreamer in puzzling symbolic images, literature may be said to function in a similar way. The author of a literary text can be compared to a dreamer transcribing his dreams into written language. But just as a dreamer is often unaware of the meaning of his/her own dreams, writers too cannot always explain what it is that their writings mean. The writing of literature is many times an almost unconscious performance which allows for the halfveiled expression of ideas and concepts which transcend the conscious mental life or avowed intentions of authors. Dealing frequently with highly charged, emotionally loaded, dangerous, or threatening ideas and desires, dreams and literary texts constitute ways of giving 'safe' (i.e. unclear, ambiguous, and concealed) and also powerful and influential expression to materials which, for a variety of reasons, cannot or should not be fully brought into consciousness or verbal expression. Therefore, the opinions and ideas of an author about his/her own work are not necessarily the most reliable guides toward a meaningful interpretation of a text. Like a psychoanalyst and his patient, an intelligent and attentive reader may be able to understand a text better than the very person who wrote it.

Given that literature attempts to promote certain ideas, values, or ideologies, one might inquire as to their precise nature and content. All literary works are produced by specific human beings belonging to specific cultures at given historical times and occupying very definite positions within the structures and hierarchies of their societies. Not surprisingly, the ideas and values which literary works seek to promote are influenced by the history, culture and circumstances relevant to the individuals who produce them. Rather than a disinterested or idealistic endeavor, literature is a very worldly and very practical sort of activity aimed at the promotion and dissemination of cultural values and views of the world which are tightly connected to the interests of the author and of the dominant and other powers in her/his society. It should be noted of course that the relation of the author to the powers, institutions, and systems of belief of his/her time can be one of affinity, opposition, or even ambiguity. For these reasons, an understanding of literature and of particular literary texts depends not only on the isolated reading of certain individual works and the consideration of their authors's lives and their circumstances but also upon a solid knowledge and critical examination of the human history, language, and culture (including art, music, philosophy, religion, science, politics, etc.) of which literature forms part and which it represents. The study of literature is therefore an eminently interdisciplinary endeavor through which we attempt to make sense of the human experience throughout history and of the ways in which human beings represent that experience and come to an understanding of themselves and of the world around them.

An important feature of literary texts which distinguishes them from other kinds of persuasive discourse is the fact that they operate not through direct statement and explicit revelation of their contents but instead through indirect allusion, understatement, implication, and even concealment. Literary texts in effect often veil the 'truth' which they seek to convey in an attempt at enhancing its attractiveness and endowing it with a sense of mystery and transcendental value. Literature, much like modern advertisement, is often an attempt at persuasion which operates on subliminal levels and artfully instills its message by concealing it under a cover of fictional situations and devices affecting the audience on emotional, intuitive, experiential, and instinctive levels. A given story for example may seek to promote a particular view of the world not by flatly stating it but instead by constructing a set of emotionally charged and seemingly "realistic" situations leading to the almost unavoidable, but always unstated, conclusion of the story's intended moral. Literary texts thus convey meaning to their readers in ways which go far beyond the mere literal or "surface" level of signification. Indeed, literary texts distinguish themselves from other texts by the subtleties and intricacies of their many levels of meaning and by the common fact that the actual "meaning" of the text is almost always hidden and implicit in the fabric of the work's devices. Meaning in literature is therefore something that needs to be determined not merely on the basis of a face value understanding of the words in it but through a complete evaluation of the signifying complexity of the rhetoric, figures of speech, images, symbols, allusions, connotations, suggestions, and implications of the entire text.

Given its tendency to speak about its subject indirectly, the essential mode of communication of literature may be said to be a symbolic one. A symbol may be defined in general terms as a signifier of a complex nature which always places its most important referent outside of itself. For the purposes of conveying meaning, literary texts make use of a variety of special signifying devices--known in general as figures or tropes--such as symbols, allegories, metaphors, metonymies, similes, paradoxes, ironies, etc. Although each literary device has a name and a definition, it is not so important to know what they are called so much as to understand that, in general, symbolic figures make indirect references and create semi-invisible chains of association between different sets of images, concepts, and ideas. The associative logic that governs the behavior of those chains of meaning, however, is not always fixed or consistent and often varies widely from text to text and even within a single text. A sensitive and alert reading of a particular text is therefore of paramount importance in discovering the internally-defined logic of association relevant to that text and its parts.

While the logic of association of literary texts is unstable and variable, it is almost always grounded on binary systems of distinctions and polar oppositions defined either by literary convention and/or internally within the text. Given a set of basic symbolic oppositions, connections created by symbolic figures in a text are generally governed by similarities to and differences from the basic binary parameters. Being able to perceive similarities and differences between groups of images, words, and ideas in a text is therefore the first step toward the discovery of its underlying categories and structures of symbols and ideas. Take for example a story where a cruel monster is described as having the appearance of a mountain lion and where later we find a seemingly virtuous man also compared to a mountain lion. We can begin to perceive that, although they may seem very different, the text also wants us in a way to place the man and the monster in the same category and perhaps understand that the man is also, in some mysterious sense, a cruel monster. Such a story could in a very subtle way be implying a critical comment concerning the character of its hero or even the virtues cherished in the society in which the hero lives. Often indeed under the façade of an unbelievable tale of monsters and adventures lies hidden the architecture of an entire set of values and a complex system of thought and ideas.

Outline of important points and issues:

• Literature as entertainment and education; to delight and influence the audience
• Horace (65-8 B.C.): literature "dulce et utile" ("sweet and useful")
• Literature as rhetorical practice, relation to arts of persuasion
• Binding together of ideas with words and imagery appealing to the senses, as well as situations evoking an emotional response from the audience (pity, fear, sympathy, happiness, sadness, love, hate, etc.)
• Figurality of literary signification: symbol, metaphor, allegory; meaning beyond the literal
• Levels/layers of meaning: literal and figural or symbolic level of meaning
• The symbolic level has been sometimes subdivided into other levels--such as the moral, the allegorical, the anagogic--by authors and thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) and Dante (1265-1321).
• Tradition of representing ideas, concepts, values, and spiritual notions by means of sensory images. Thomas Aquinas believed the use of metaphors also relevant and appropriate to the biblical text: ". . . it is befitting Holy Scripture to put forward divine and spiritual truths by means of comparisons with material things. . . . Now it is natural to man to attain to intellectual truths through sensible things, because all our knowledge originates from sense. Hence in Holy Scripture spiritual truths are fittingly taught under the likeness of material things" (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica)
• Hermeneutics, exegesis: arts of textual interpretation; the search for meaning beyond the obvious and the literal
• Authors: intentions of the author; conscious and unconscious processes; Freud, dreams, dreamers and creative writers; determinants of the authorial conscious and unconscious: desire, history, culture, economics, politics, etc.; fragmentation/heterogeneity of the human subject and corresponding phenomena in the literary text; basis for variety of interpretations

[source: http://mockingbird.creighton.edu/english/fajardo/teaching/Miscellan/understand.htm]

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Literature based on Sartre Oppinion

What is literature? (French title: Qu'est ce que la littérature?) is a 1947 book by Jean-Paul Sartre. (Alternative title: Literature and Existentialism)

It is divided into three topics of discussion, What is writing? Why write? And for whom does one write? Sartre has written a complete historical encyclopaedia of the audience. In his analysis of the audience, he condemns the bourgeoisie as being devoid of culture, claims authors and poets are outside of language and are trapped, and states that the writer must write for a public which has the freedom of changing everything.

Sartre in this manifesto leaves aside the lonely man, from which existentialism is founded, and devises an understanding of the effect it has on its reader subject.

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Ars Poetica

Ars Poetica is a term meaning "The Art of Poetry" or "On the Nature of Poetry". It originated with a work by Horace and has since spawned many other poems that bear the same name. Three of the most notable examples, including the work by Horace, are as follows.

Ars Poetica (also known as "The Art of Poetry", Epistula Ad Pisones, or Letters to Piso) was a treatise on poetics. It was first translated into English by Queen Elizabeth I. Three quotes in particular are associated with the work:

• "in medias res", or "into the middle of things"; this describes a popular narrative technique that appears frequently in ancient epics and remains popular to this day

• "bonus dormitat Homerus" or "even Homer nods"; an indication that even the most skilled poet can make continuity errors

• "ut pictura poesis", or "As is painting so is poetry", by which Horace meant that poetry (in its widest sense, "imaginative texts") merited the same careful interpretation that was, in Horace's day, reserved for painting.

The latter two quotes occur back-to-back, near the end of the treatise.

The best known poem by Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982) took its title and subject from Horace's work. His poem "Ars Poetica" contains the line "A poem should not mean/but be", which was a classic statement of the modernist aesthetic. The original manuscript of the poem resides in the Library of Congress.

Ars Poetica

A poem should be palpable and mute

As a globed fruit,

Dumb

As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone

Of casement ledges where the moss has grown--

A poem should be wordless

As the flight of birds.

A poem should be motionless in time

As the moon climbs,

Leaving, as the moon releases

Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves.

Memory by memory the mind--

A poem should be motionless in time

As the moon climbs.

A poem should be equal to:

Not true.

For all the history of grief

An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love

The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea--

A poem should not mean

But be.

[source: wikipedia]

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What is Literature?

Literature is literally "acquaintance with letters" as in the first sense given in the Oxford English Dictionary (from the Latin littera meaning "an individual written character (letter)"). The term has generally come to identify a collection of texts or works of art, which in Western culture are mainly prose, both fiction and non-fiction, drama and poetry. In much, if not all of the world, texts can be oral as well, and include such genres as epic, legend, myth, ballad, plus other forms of oral poetry, and folktale.

Introduction

Nations can have literatures, as can corporations, philosophical schools or historical periods. Popular belief commonly holds that the literature of a nation, for example, comprises the collection of texts which make it a whole nation. The Hebrew Bible, Persian Shahnama, the Indian Mahabharata, Ramayana and Thirukural, the Iliad and the Odyssey, Beowulf, and the Constitution of the United States, all fall within this definition of a kind of literature.^{[citation needed]}

More generally, one can equate a literature with a collection of stories, poems, and plays that revolve around a particular topic. In this case, the stories, poems and plays may or may not have nationalistic implications. The Western Canon forms one such literature.

The term "literature" has different meanings depending on who is using it and in what context. It could be applied broadly to mean any symbolic record, encompassing everything from images and sculptures to letters. In a more narrow sense the term could mean only text composed of letters, or other examples of symbolic written language (Egyptian hieroglyphs, for example). An even more narrow interpretation is that text have a physical form, such as on paper or some other portable form, to the exclusion of inscriptions or digital media.

Furthermore, people may perceive a difference between "literature" and some popular forms of written work. The terms "literary fiction" and "literary merit" often serve to distinguish between individual works. For example, almost all literate people perceive the works of Charles Dickens as "literature", whereas some critics^{[citation needed]} look down on the works of Jeffrey Archer as unworthy of inclusion under the general heading of "English literature". Critics may exclude works from the classification "literature", for example, on the grounds of a poor standard of grammar and syntax, of an unbelievable or disjointed story-line, or of inconsistent or unconvincing characters. Genre fiction (for example: romance, crime, or science fiction) may also become excluded from consideration as "literature".

Frequently, the texts that make up literature crossed over these boundaries. Illustrated stories, hypertexts, cave paintings and inscribed monuments have all at one time or another pushed the boundaries of "literature".

Different historical periods have emphasized various characteristics of literature. Early works often had an overt or covert religious or didactic purpose. Moralizing or prescriptive literature stems from such sources. The exotic nature of romance flourished from the Middle Ages onwards, whereas the Age of Reason manufactured nationalistic epics and philosophical tracts. Romanticism emphasized the popular folk literature and emotive involvement, but gave way in the 19th-century West to a phase of so-called realism and naturalism, investigations into what is real. The 20th century brought demands for symbolism or psychological insight in the delineation and development of character.

The Muslim Scientist and Philosopher Imam Ja'far al-Sadiq defined Literature as follows: "Literature is the garment which one puts on what he says or writes so that it may appear more attractive."^[1]

Form of Literature

Poetry

A poem is defined as a composition written in verse (although verse has been equally used for epic and dramatic fiction). Poems rely heavily on imagery, precise word choice, and metaphor; they may take the form of measures consisting of patterns of stresses (metric feet) or of patterns of different-length syllables (as in classical prosody); and they may or may not utilize rhyme. One cannot readily characterize poetry precisely. Typically though, poetry as a form of literature makes some significant use of the formal properties of the words it uses — the properties attached to the written or spoken form of the words, rather than to their meaning. Metre depends on syllables and on rhythms of speech; rhyme and alliteration depend on words that have similar pronunciation. Some recent poets, such as E. E. Cummings, made extensive use of words' visual form.

Poetry perhaps pre-dates other forms of literature: early known examples include the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh (dated from around 2700 B.C.), parts of the Bible, the surviving works of Homer (the Iliad and the Odyssey), and the Indian epics Ramayana and Mahabharata. In cultures based primarily on oral traditions the formal characteristics of poetry often have a mnemonic function, and important texts: legal, genealogical or moral, for example, may appear first in verse form.

Much poetry uses specific forms: the haiku, the limerick, or the sonnet, for example. A traditional haiku written in Japanese must have something to do with nature, contain seventeen onji (syllables), distributed over three lines in groups of five, seven, and five, and should also have a kigo, a specific word indicating a season. A limerick has five lines, with a rhyme scheme of AABBA, and line lengths of 3,3,2,2,3 stressed syllables. It traditionally has a less reverent attitude towards nature.

Language and tradition dictate some poetic norms: Persian poetry always rhymes, Greek poetry rarely rhymes, Italian or French poetry often does, English and German can go either way (although modern non-rhyming poetry often, perhaps unfairly, has a more "serious" aura). Perhaps the most paradigmatic style of English poetry, blank verse, as exemplified in works by Shakespeare and by Milton, consists of unrhymed iambic pentameters. Some languages prefer longer lines; some shorter ones. Some of these conventions result from the ease of fitting a specific language's vocabulary and grammar into certain structures, rather than into others; for example, some languages contain more rhyming words than others, or typically have longer words. Other structural conventions come about as the result of historical accidents, where many speakers of a language associate good poetry with a verse form preferred by a particular skilled or popular poet.

Works for theatre (see below) traditionally took verse form. This has now become rare outside opera and musicals, although many would argue that the language of drama remains intrinsically poetic.

In recent years, digital poetry has arisen that takes advantage of the artistic, publishing, and synthetic qualities of digital media.

Drama

A play or drama offers another classical literary form that has continued to evolve over the years. It generally comprises chiefly dialogue between characters, and usually aims at dramatic / theatrical performance (see theatre) rather than at reading. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, opera developed as a combination of poetry, drama, and music. Nearly all drama took verse form until comparatively recently. Shakespeare could be considered drama. Romeo and Juliet, for example, is a classic romantic drama generally accepted as literature.

- - Greek drama exemplifies the earliest form of drama of which we have substantial knowledge. Tragedy, as a dramatic genre, developed as a performance associated with religious and civic festivals, typically enacting or developing upon well-known historical or mythological themes. Tragedies generally presented very serious Theme. - - With the advent of newer technologies, scripts written for non-stage media have been added to this form. War of the Worlds (radio) in 1938 saw the advent of literature written for radio broadcast, and many works of Drama have been adapted for film or television. Conversely, television, film, and radio literature have been adapted to printed or electronic media. -'wekipedia literature'-

Essays

An essay consists of a discussion of a topic from an author's personal point of view, exemplified by works by Francis Bacon or by Charles Lamb.

'Essay' in English derives from the French 'essai', meaning 'attempt'. Thus one can find open-ended, provocative and/or inconclusive essays. The term "essays" first applied to the self-reflective musings of Michel de Montaigne, and even today he has a reputation as the father of this literary form.

Genres related to the essay may include:

• the memoir, telling the story of an author's life from the author's personal point of view
• the epistle: usually a formal, didactic, or elegant letter.
• the blog, an informal short rant about a particular topic or topics, usually opinion

Prose fiction

Prose consists of writing that does not adhere to any particular formal structures (other than simple grammar); "non-poetic writing," writing, perhaps. The term sometimes appears pejoratively, but prosaic writing simply says something without necessarily trying to say it in a beautiful way, or using beautiful words. Prose writing can of course take beautiful form; but less by virtue of the formal features of words (rhymes, alliteration, metre) but rather by style, placement, or inclusion of graphics. But one need not mark the distinction precisely, and perhaps cannot do so. Note the classifications:

• "prose poetry", which attempts to convey the aesthetic richness typical of poetry using only prose
• "free verse", or poetry not adhering to any of the structures of one or another formal poetic style

Narrative fiction (narrative prose) generally favours prose for the writing of novels, short stories, graphic novels, and the like. Singular examples of these exist throughout history, but they did not develop into systematic and discrete literary forms until relatively recent centuries. Length often serves to categorize works of prose fiction. Although limits remain somewhat arbitrary, modern publishing conventions dictate the following:

• A Mini Saga is a short story of exactly 50 words
• A Flash fiction is generally defined as a piece of prose under a thousand words.
• A short story comprises prose writing of less than 10,000 to 20,000 words, but typically more than 500 words, which may or may not have a narrative arc.
• A story containing between 20,000 and 50,000 words falls into the novella category.
• A work of fiction containing more than 50,000 words falls squarely into the realm of the novel.

A novel consists simply of a long story written in prose, yet the form developed comparatively recently. Icelandic prose sagas dating from about the 11th century bridge the gap between traditional national verse epics and the modern psychological novel. In mainland Europe, the Spaniard Cervantes wrote perhaps the first influential novel: Don Quixote, the first part of which was published in 1605 and the second in 1615. Earlier collections of tales, such as Boccaccio's Decameron and Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, have comparable forms and would classify as novels if written today. Earlier works written in Asia resemble even more strongly the novel as we now think of it — for example, works such as the Chinese Romance of the Three Kingdoms and the Japanese Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki. Compare to The Book of One Thousand and One Nights.

Early novels in Europe did not, at the time, count as significant literature, perhaps because "mere" prose writing seemed easy and unimportant. It has become clear, however, that prose writing can provide aesthetic pleasure without adhering to poetic forms. Additionally, the freedom authors gain in not having to concern themselves with verse structure translates often into a more complex plot or into one richer in precise detail than one typically finds even in narrative poetry. This freedom also allows an author to experiment with many different literary and presentation styles — including poetry— in the scope of a single novel.

See Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel. [This definition needs expansion]

Other prose literature

Philosophy, history, journalism, and legal and scientific writings traditionally ranked as literature. They offer some of the oldest prose writings in existence; novels and prose stories earned the names "fiction" to distinguish them from factual writing or nonfiction, which writers historically have crafted in prose.

The "literary" nature of science writing has become less pronounced over the last two centuries, as advances and specialization have made new scientific research inaccessible to most audiences; science now appears mostly in journals. Scientific works of Euclid, Aristotle, Copernicus, and Newton still possess great value; but since the science in them has largely become outdated, they no longer serve for scientific instruction, yet they remain too technical to sit well in most programmes of literary study. Outside of "history of science" programmes students rarely read such works. Many books "popularizing" science might still deserve the title "literature"; history will tell.

Philosophy, too, has become an increasingly academic discipline. More of its practitioners lament this situation than occurs with the sciences; nonetheless most new philosophical work appears in academic journals. Major philosophers through history—Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Descartes, Nietzsche—have become as canonical as any writers. Some recent philosophy works are argued to merit the title "literature", such as some of the works by Simon Blackburn; but much of it does not, and some areas, such as logic, have become extremely technical to a degree similar to that of mathematics.

A great deal of historical writing can still rank as literature, particularly the genre known as creative nonfiction. So can a great deal of journalism, such as literary journalism. However these areas have become extremely large, and often have a primarily utilitarian purpose: to record data or convey immediate information. As a result the writing in these fields often lacks a literary quality, although it often and in its better moments has that quality. Major "literary" historians include Herodotus, Thucydides and Procopius, all of whom count as canonical literary figures.

Law offers a less clear case. Some writings of Plato and Aristotle, or even the early parts of the Bible, might count as legal literature. The law tables of Hammurabi of Babylon might count. Roman civil law as codified in the Corpus Juris Civilis during the reign of Justinian I of the Byzantine Empire has a reputation as significant literature. The founding documents of many countries, including the United States Constitution, can count as literature; however legal writing now rarely exhibits literary merit.

Game Design Scripts - In essence never seen by the player of a game and only by the developers and/or publishers, the audience for these pieces is usually very small. Still, many game scripts contain immersive stories and detailed worlds making them hidden literary gems.

Most of these fields, then, through specialization or proliferation, no longer generally constitute "literature" in the sense under discussion. They may sometimes count as "literary literature"; more often they produce what one might call "technical literature" or "professional literature".

[source: wikipedia]

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