[Music] [Music] [Applause] dear participants welcome to the second module of our introductory week in this week we would begin by establishing the parameters within which we would define literature culture and media for further discussions in elaborations today in this module I would take up literature and try to understand what are the basic definitions how these definitions have changed over time and what are the on-going debates in the current scenario if we look at the etymology and lexical definitions of the world literature we find that it has its origin in late Middle English why of French from Latin terms literature a' from litera which meant writing formed with letters initially as the roots suggest it was used in the sense of knowledge of books generally speaking literature is considered to be an art form or any single writing which is supposed to have intrinsic artistic as well as intellectual value which often uses language in ways which are different from the day-to-day and ordinary usage of language dictionaries have also attempted to define the term in their own ways Oxford Dictionary suggests that it is a collection of written works especially those considered of superior or lasting artistic merit Merriam Webster's dictionary suggests that it denotes writings in prose or furs especially writings having excellence of formal expression and expressing ideas of permanent universal and perennial interest we can also say that this term can be used for a body of written works which is produced in a particular language in a particular country in a particular age it can also be a body of writing written on a particular subject may also be linked with the production of scientific literature and in a broad manner printed matter on any subject the 11th edition of encyclopedia britannica has defined literature as the best expression of the best thought reduced to writing however this passionate attempt at defining literature does not help us to objectively look at what ultimately constitutes literature at the same time our understanding of what constitutes literature has changed over time prior to the 18th century or we find that all types of books and writings who were included under this umbrella heading during the 19th century particularly during the Romantic era we find that the Association of literature with particular types of imaginative writing started during the 20th century we find that the interpretations have become more and more inclusive so now we have started to incorporate not only the written texts but also the non written oral art forms I study of films can also be taken up and at the same time not creative types of writings for example autobiographies can also be included in our definition of literature major forms of literature or major genres of literature our poetry drama and prose which also includes fiction writing novels short stories etc however we find that with the passage of time and with the advancements in media and technology the shape of literary journals is also transforming so in the course of our lectures we would discuss how the definitions of literature changes with the passage of time and how the different journals of literature are also taking a new shape continually when we try to clear by certain principles related with literature we normally look at the differences between literature and non literature we also look at what constitutes the literary Ness within a particular type of writing literature also raises certain questions for example does it need to be written in a linguistic medium only does it always have to possess a superior value a universal artistic or aesthetic understanding of emotions in values there may be various definitions of literature and the issue of deciding what constitutes a literature and also what is responsible for creating literally neurs in a piece of writing remain to be highly subjective does it involve narrowing down a set of necessary features and characteristics etc that are is specific and yet at the same time brought enough to include the vast and heterogeneous body of writing usually taken as literature so we find that most of the definitions are culturally constructed and they keep on changing as newer understandings about what is relevant in our world change conventionally it was believed that there are three main ways of approaching a definition of literature and they are relativism subjectivism and agnosticism relativism suggests that there are no value distinctions in literature and anything may be called a piece of good literature depending on our own understanding it is also in a way related with subjectivism we suggest that all theory of literary value are subjective and therefore literary evaluation is highly personal and independent of any outside context agnosticism also is stems from the subjectivism though it argues that there maybe real distinctions in literary value still it claims that our subjective value systems prevent us from knowing anything about what constitutes a real value in a literary text if we look at the contemporary discussions about how to define an understand literature our attention is brought towards what is known as a procedural definition of literature it was basically suggested by Stephen Davis in definitions of art where he has suggested that procedural ism provides the best definition of art as well as literature as opposed to any functionalist definition though the doctrine itself has certain fuzziness and is not very clear as any type of sequence of actions can be taken up as a procedure by a particular critic instant procedural is defined a way of reading a text or interpreting a text and designate this method as being a literary method however it can also be said that critics and readers can interpret a literary text in a variety of ways according to different procedures or aims so there would be a multiplicity of approaches even if we do not take into account the possibility of multiple interpretations of a particular piece of writing however we find that there are many critics who agree that the procedural way of understanding definitions of literature is a pragmatic way a prominent critic Jones LT RI has suggested that it is a popular way of defining literature and he has rejected serum structuralism of bartha's as well as Derrida in favor of procedural definitions of literature however procedural definitions of literature do not resolve the problem of classifications they also don't exclaim why a particular piece happens to be literature and another piece of writing does not come in the same category how is it that we can say that either Tom Jones or pride of prejudice constitutes a literary canon but an article on a steroid for example does not the defined procedures can be applied through both a literary text as well as to a non literary text a particular procedure which has been defined and taken up to understand and evaluate a literary text can also be applied to a non literary text it also refers to a way of treating texts rather than a body of writings LT rice suggests that when we regard it takes this literary one of the things we learn to do when we read is to alter certain ethereal intentions and at times to impose features for example like coherence on text which they may not possess very clearly secondly according to him we isolate certain general significance in a set of particular texts however it has often been criticized by various other critics mystical can be quoted here who suggests that the procedural definition of literature rest only false presupposition as there is no single procedure of reading and interpreting that characterizes the literary another way of understanding the definition of literature is related with the linguistics approach to word set according to the linguistic definitions of literature literature is different from other kinds of writing because it uses language in a spatial and in a very distinctive way it is tempting to suggest that your work is literary if it uses language only to create a work of fiction since a lot of literature is fictional but literature cannot be equated with fiction and here in this context we are not using the word fiction as it is used to denote a particular genre this interpretation is independent of this association with the johner rather it indicates creativity and something which is not necessarily factual so literature cannot be equated with fiction and being fiction is not necessarily a precondition for being literature we can also take up certain other examples as fiction is not necessarily literature as it pervades our life we can look at the examples of advertisements homemade fictions pulp novels jokes comic books etcetera because they are also a figment of fiction even though they do not constitute any literary understanding some of these can be considered as being a part of the popular literature when we use the term popular literature we also have to refer to the binaries of high and low literary forms which would be taken up during the course of our discussions in one of the later modules but not all these types of fictional writings can be incorporated even in what has been classically considered as a low form of literature or is a popular literature at the same time we find that is strangely works like glue talks lives mailers armies of the night or Capades in cold blood are regarded as literature even though they are not fiction it can be said that paradigmatic forms of literature are fiction and they constitute the core of literature yet the binary of fiction and nonfiction does not constitute the principle for defining what is literature and what is not other attempts to define literature are related with the way in which a writer can use language and it may be said that the author must write in a special way what is writing to be considered literature but what exactly is this spacial way we can say that literature uses a highly connotative language and these discussions pioneered by David dishes are still fresh in our mind so we can say that the language may be replete with metaphors irony ambiguity figures of his speech and other ways of creating a connotative meaning as contrasted with the denotative meaning of non-literary prose these characteristics are normally associated with literature and therefore they can specify how one should write to produce what can be understood as literature according to this notion the Russian formalists defined literature by defining what constitutes literary language the major critic whom we can refer here is Ramon Jacobson who had said that literature is a kind of writing which represents an organized violence committed on ordinary speech according to him the literary language deviates from ordinary speech transforms as well as intensifies the everyday speech it can be said that if literature refers to a specific use of language or wrists on a specific organization of language it might produce a certain literary Ness in it it may refer to a collection of devices like rhythm sound patterns in text meter other types of narrative techniques and sets of literary elements these devices can also be seen as interconnected elements of functions within a total system what is common in all these devices is their estranging property the property of D familiarizing the familiar linguists designate little eNOS as the discrepancy between the signifier and the signified this literary language according to them is different from other discourses as it estranges deforms and intensifies the ordinary speech formalist also believed that ordinary language produces automatic responses and we can goat dairy eagleton here who suggests that literature by forcing us into a dramatic awareness of language refreshes these habitual responses and renders objects more perceptible formalists believe that literature has its own laws its own rules structures and devices which have to be studied in themselves independently and for them form is more important than the content so form takes precedence over content as far as the formalist are concerned still there are certain problems in defining the literary knees of a piece of writing norms of language change over a passage of time as language is also rooted in social and historical specificity what is the norm today can turn to be a deviation tomorrow an astringent piece of language does not remain a string G always and everywhere and it can be considered as astringent against a set normative linguistic pattern an interesting example may be quoted of Shakespeare's prose which is estranging today even though at the time when he was writing it was perhaps the norm thus we can say that if the norm of language changes then the writing may not be seen as literary anymore in a different time zone the formalist are aware of this difficulty this conundrum and that is why they never attempted to define literature rather they try to define what constitutes literary turns per se which can be found in a literary text but simultaneously also in writings which are not considered literature so defining literature in terms of how it is written is also problematic because literary styles often engender counter styles some literary works may use highly metaphoric style highly symbolic prose and at the same time others may use a non symbolic words or a mundane type of a prose and can still be considered as a part of literature at the same time there are certain other difficulties also literature cannot be defined in terms of literary style featuring complimentary properties as it would mean that everything is literature in one way or the other at the same time we also see the reflections or what we understand to be literary devices or styles in our day-to-day speech patterns these devices may be associated with a piece of literary writing but at the same time they are not unique to literary writing so this approach which attempts to define literature in terms of its perceptible properties in terms of characteristic surface features is not very promising as Terry Eagleton has also claimed another recent approach towards definitions of literature is to consider it as an informal institution or practice it looks at the significance of context which surrounds the utterance production and dissemination of language in characterizing whether the language is literally or non literary it suggests that language can inherently possess literary characteristics that is the presence of literary devices in ordinary speech thus we characterize something as literary if it is part of a text which calls itself novel or poetry for example if we look at our text which is widely recognized as a piece of literature or it is a part of literary content for example it is a part of the university syllabus then we would understand it as being a part of literature as it is associated with a particular institution thus the context informs us whether a particular use of language is literary or not but the language itself may not have the inherent properties or qualities which might distinguish it from other types of discourses many texts might have been regarded as literature in academic spaces might not have been constructed as literature actively for instance our text can start off as a historical to ties or is a philosophical book and can then come to be regarded as literature at a later stage similarly some works can be written as literature at a particular time but later on may be valued for their archaeological or historical or ethnographic value rather than looking at their artistic and intrinsically literary properties thus the value judgments change the subjective assessment of the characteristics of texts also change and as they have an important role to play in what is regarded as literature we find that these definitions do not have any fixity a piece of writing may be considered fine or good to be designated as literature the notion of fine writing in itself is debatable one can say that the notion of fine writing or belly letters is defined by those people who are expected to possess the ability to make such type of value judgments for example critics theorists academicians etc and at the same time this piece of literature should possess certain universal or significant aesthetic and artistic qualities thus it would follow that literature is a tie of highly-valued writing but there are certain ramifications also it also means that the fact that we are assigning our text a literary place on-demand creature is not objective in fact it remains to be highly subjective and because the subjective element is predominant in defining a work as literary or non literary there is nothing permanent about our understanding of what constitutes literature anything can be seen as literary and a piece of writing can cease to be literature at any point in history if the parameters of value judgments change and some very interesting examples can be cited for example Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights when it was published in 1847 and Herman Melville's moby-dick when it was published in 1851 did not have a positive response from the critics and readers but in today's times they are considered to be height of literary subjectivities so it raises important questions about how these value judgments are made and which judgments about the quality of writing are legitimate and which judgments should be considered as illegitimate or irrelevant it can also be said that the academia as an institution can legitimately decide which writing constitutes literature but it brings us back to discussions about who constitutes the idea of a literary canon we would say how literary canons are formed through exclusionary practices and these practices are often based on dominant socio-cultural as well as political and national motivations rather than purely aesthetic ones we would also look into the debates of the high end low binaries popular versus literary binaries and we would see how these exclusionary practices from literary canon are based on differentiating against class gender and race etc so if our understanding of literature depends on subjective judgments which may or may not be institutionalized then the history of literature may not be considered as is stable coherent and well-defined entity at the same time there are certain other is fringe situations some fiction may be considered as literature and some may not be considered as literature how do we look at the advertising jingles for example or the pulp fiction for example some literature is fictional and some is not some literature is highly descriptive while some highly wrote writing is not a creature so what makes a certain piece a literature depends on its institutionalization as literature is based on mutable standards and parameters of judgment as I said who works with immutable and everlasting value and a set of a specific shared inherent properties literature as such may not exist the opinions about value and what constitutes valuable change over the passage of time a work of writing is treated as a philosophical writing in one ERA and may be treated as a piece of literature in a different era for example Aristotle's Poetics is now read as literature where is at the time when it was written and compiled it was not considered as literature at all the grounds on the basis of which we take our decision about what is valuable and what is not also change over time a piece of writing can belong to a particular category that may be generally regarded as highly valuable but a certain specimen of it may be considered inferior and therefore may not be a part of literature and later on may be excluded from the literary canon so literary canon by normal definition includes only those pieces of writing which are deemed as representative works of an era those which carry unquestionably high value judgments in terms of aesthetic and artistic properties but the understanding of literary canon as the unquestioned great tradition of the national literature has to be recognized as a construct as Terry Eagleton suggests it is fashioned by particular people for particular reasons at a given time so no literary work or tradition can be considered as valuable in itself value is and remains to be a highly positive as well as a highly transitive term what is valued by a certain group of people at a certain point of time may be modified and therefore we can say that the parameters of value are not Universal they do not transcend the limitations of time and space rather we can say that they are based on socio cultural and historical specificities thus given enough transformations in the society we can say that in there may be a future in which classical writings like Iliad and Odyssey may no longer be seen as meaningful or valuable another approach in this framework is based on the intention of the author and this approach attempts to define literature in terms of authorial intention it is pertinent to quote here Lamarque and Olson who suggest that our text is identified as a literary work by recognizing the author's intention that the text is produced and meant to be read within a framework of conventions defining the practice of literature so the basic intention here is that the expectation that the reader adopts a certain position towards a piece of writing and this definition ultimately finalizes the expectation of literary and aesthetic value for Lamarck and Olsen literary aesthetic value has two constituents and they define these constituents as the creative imaginative element and secondly the mimetic component of literary aesthetic value the creative imaginative element is based on the imposition of a form or a unity or a coherence on his chosen subject for example different writers may take up the same subject we can take the example of aeschylus sophocles and europe ideas who have taken up the electric storage and they have imposed different forms on the subject to produce starkly different versions they also interpret it differently to present different notions of the significance of the subject matter the mimetic component of literary aesthetic value is related with a piece of writing which contains interesting content which is presented through the use of universal themes these themes constitute the importance of a particular version of his story and render it relatable across generations and thus the mimetic quality may be considered as a combination of cognitive and aesthetic value of a work which bestows an enduring quality on a piece of writing works are designated as works of literature by identifying the authorial intention to create a literary as well as aesthetic value and the intention to create in readers and expectation of such a value it is however debatable whether only works created with such a conscious intention are identified as literature similarly we can look at literature as imaginative writing it was a notion of literature in the nineteenth century and bodies of writings which were considered as art came to be regarded as imaginative writing now to understand this type of a classification it is important to unpack the notion of imagination it is not what a writer must do to create a work of literature rather it refers to a plethora of values for which literature is appreciated and highly regarded aesthetic value is the overall experience of a work of art but it is not exhaustive and characteristics of imaginative writings have several categories we can look at the East etic cognitive and interpretation oriented values the cognitive value consists of two things firstly it is vivid ideas derived from the works and secondly what we learn about ourselves more is speculatively of other people when we see how we react to these conceptions so imaginative can also refer to different types of genres however we find that even though what is common in these journals is the character of being fiction however fiction is never equivalent to literature in all situations an illustration of what can be put into the literary canon and what is excluded out of it also suggests that the distinctions between fiction and nonfiction had been permeable categories in earlier times and we can illustrate it with giving the example of the 19th century literature which has included the writings of lamb as well as Macaulay and Milt but the writings of Marx Bentham Darwin and Spencer have been excluded from the definitions of 19th century literature so literature includes a lot of factual writing and it also excludes a lot of it and we can look at the case of Superman and spider-man comics and Mills and Boon do we regard them as literature and do we put them in the same category for example as the works of Rushdie and Nepal also if literature is simply creative or imaginative does it mean that philosophy history and sociology for that matter are unimaginative and on creative so we come back to an interpretation centered value of literature literature is valued because it invites interpretation it invites readers to give meaning to a work readers are able to look at what is the authorial intention in creating a text but they move a step ahead and they have the capability to derive multiple meanings thus reading in the context of literature is an active process because readers are never passive recipients they read or text in a creative and imaginative manner and they understand the text with the background of their own times different historical eras read our text differently and at the same time each reader also imbues a text with their own values so all literate texts are rewritten continuously consciously as well as unconsciously by the societies in which they are read by the readers who are reading them so therefore what counts as literature or what it means is always a highly subjective and therefore a highly unstable subject we can say that literature cannot be understood in terms of some essential quality or property or possessing a set of inherent characteristics which is displayed only in particular types of writings it is also impossible to isolate some constant and common set of features from all that is considered under the rubric of literature perhaps literature is any kind of writing which for some reason or the other is regarded as highly valuable it is an ontological category which tells us about the role and purpose of a text even a claim that literature implies non pragmatic use of language is not very helpful because there are always other in parallel linguistic forms at the same time we find that there is no fundamental quintessence of literature and any type of writing may be read non pragmatically as Eagleton has pointed out it is also not about the fixed nature of what constitutes literature rather we have to look at a particular text in its relations with other texts and context to understand what constitutes literature and what constitutes value in a piece of writing which is considered as a piece of literature we can think of literature as a number of ways in which people relate themselves to writing what kind of human practices have been centred around a particular piece of writing and to what end is it utilized it brings us back to the function of literature and I would conclude my discussion by quoting Dorothy Hall who in her essay the function of literature she has talked of the problem of social organization in our today's life and its associated turmoil in our emotional and mental lives she remarks that the contemporary perspective is to view literature as having necessarily a social function that is to enable us to find a way to a better future even though it may seem to be a simple and a unifying scheme for a vast and amorphous phenomenon he still she thinks that this particular idea makes literature is still relevant besides one way crooks to reinforce her point who has suggested that many writers in the past have performed this function and because of it the belief in literature persist that it would enable us to find a way to a better future to understand ourselves as better human beings thank you [Music]