Literature is typically considered the most imaginative use of language. Although poetry and the novel, for the most part, use the ordinary words of the familiar natural languages, it has seemed to many reflective people that the literary function of language is entirely different from the roles nonliterary language plays. In addition to poetry and the novel, the study of literature often encompasses a wide variety of writing including the essay, the play, the short story, film scripts, and ordinary nonfictional journalism.
It is interesting to think about how a standard literary concept such as narrative can differ in its use in other art forms such as film or even painting or architecture. However, in the chapter “What Is Literature?” the Marxist literary theorist Terry Eagleton reviews, but rejects, various attempts to demarcate the literary from ordinary usage. In short, Eagleton takes a skeptical position and claims that there is no “essence” to literature. He thinks of literature as functional rather than ontological; that is, it is something we do in certain social contexts rather than as some kind of fixed thing. In Eagleton’s mind, to think otherwise is to tie the category of literature to the support of systems of political power.
In one attempt to locate the distinctive connection between language and literature, the British philosopher R. G. Collingwood argues that literary art has a special relationship to emotion. Poetry, for example, is not properly concerned with the arousal of emotion. For Collingwood the arousal of emotion is a mere craft, a means to the end of manipulating an audience—not art. However, poetry as art is the expression of emotion. According to Collingwood, to express emotion is to become conscious of it in a clear and individualized manner. For him, we do not really know what we feel until we express those feelings in a properly lucid manner. When that happens, our poetry is artistic in Collingwood’s sense of being “art proper.”
Continuing the theme of expression, Garry Hagberg calls our attention to the concept of artistic expression. He sets forth certain paradoxes we encounter when we assume that what an artwork expresses is something hidden in the mind of the artist—for example, in the mind of a difficult writer like James Joyce. What an artwork expresses, he suggests, is either nothing at all or something “out there” in the public space. Hagberg turns to the later writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein for part of his analysis. One of the most controversial topics about literature concerns guidelines for the interpretation of literary texts. A seemingly obvious point of departure is that we need to acknowledge that the meaning of a novel or poem is based upon certain intentions of the author. This view has the advantage of anchoring an interpretation in an apparently objective set of circumstances. Even if we cannot now know the author’s actual intentions, the key to the meaning of a literary work is to try to reconstruct them, as best we can.
However, the philosopher Monroe C. Beardsley argues that such views are misguided. He claims that no appeal to an author’s intention can ever be conclusive evidence for the meaning of a literary work. Such evidence is never more than a clue. This view greatly influenced the literary movement known as “the New Criticism.” To interpret a work, we must look at the work independent of the author’s intention.
Staking out a more radical position in his essay, “What Is an Author?” the French philosopher Michel Foucault suggests that the very idea of an author, as a living writing individual, is a social construct to which the literary critic cannot usefully appeal. Recognizing that the very idea of author has changed historically, Foucault also argues that the actual, real people who write books stand in various kinds of relationships to, and at various “distances” from, the authorial voices of their texts and are not the absolute originators of their work. Instead, Foucault recommends that we think of an author as “a certain fundamental principle” operating upon the language of literature, which he calls “the author function.”
Richard Wollheim poses two main, incompatible options for an interpretive methodology. According to one method, which he calls “scrutiny,” an interpreter ought to pay attention to the work in itself, in isolation from its context. However, Wollheim’s sympathies lie with the alternative method, “retrieval,” which does try to locate an artwork historically. The artist’s intention, as part of this context, cannot be ignored as potentially relevant to a correct understanding of an artwork. Wollheim grants, however, that such intentions may not always be fully conscious in an author’s mind.
It is often held that the interpretation of literature is a bottomless, open-ended affair, and that the possibility of disagreement can never be closed off. Richard Shusterman reviews recent positions on the matter and argues that there are limitations to such a relativist position. Much of our understanding of texts is based upon the simple training we received when we acquired that language.
In a poem about poets and poetry written around ad 300, Lu Chi’s “The Art of Writing” praises the wonders of poetry while offering advice to poetic hopefuls about ways to succeed and shortcomings to be avoided. We have included excerpts from that poem in this section.
It is important to recognize that Western ways of appreciating literature may not be suitable for the literary products of other cultures. Richard Bodman makes this clear in his “How to Eat a Chinese Poem,” a title he does not intend frivolously. In a traditional Chinese poem, he suggests, look for the taste not the message. While a poem may involve abstractions, such as sorrow, truth, and joy, its central “eye” capitalizes upon the more concrete language of sensory experience. A Chinese poem plays upon the basic idea that words do not exhaust meaning. Bodman illustrates this with a detailed discussion of an example.
The study of literature has recently stimulated much philosophical interest in the role of imagination in narrative art. As Gregory Currie puts it in his essay, a work authorizes us to imagine various things and to remove the option of imagining others. For instance, Hamlet authorizes us to accept that Hamlet lives in Denmark, while proscribing that Hamlet was an orphan. But Hamlet also leaves indeterminate certain other things, Hamlet’s motives for instance. After drawing a distinction between different kinds of imagination, Currie takes on the task of showing how the power of imagination supports emotional responses to purely fictional beings and events in a narrative work.