1.1–What Is Literature? The View from the Surface

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.^[1]

—Adrienne Rich, “Diving into the Wreck”

We know literature when we see it. The novels you were assigned to read in high school such as The Grapes of Wrath or To Kill a Mockingbird are literature; the poems of Langston Hughes and United States Poet Laureate Joy Harjo are literature; Romeo and Juliet is literature. But what happens when we encounter texts that are not somehow granted special status in our culture as “required reading”? Are movies and television shows literature? What about video games? Songs? Fan fiction? What is literature, really?

We generally understand that literature is divided into genres or types, and these divisions are based on the form authors employ in their creation of their works. Poems are poems because they are written in verse. Short stories, novellas, and novels all fall under the category of fiction because they are all written in prose, and yet they are also unique genres. They differ not only in length but in how they accomplish the creation of their characters and plot, and whether or not and how they compress meaning into a relatively small space (short stories), a slightly larger space (novellas), or an even longer space (novels). Drama is its own unique form, incorporating elements from both poetry and prose and delivering all of these in dialogues, monologues, and soliloquies—all meant to be spoken aloud. In the following chapters you will find discussions of each of these long-acknowledged genres, as well as newer genres like film, and short forays into how you might begin writing about each.

These are the different forms literary works usually take. But what qualifies as literature and who gets to decide? Determining what does and does not “count” as literature is ultimately up to communities of readers and writers who are in conversation with each other and who share aesthetic values, tastes, and assumptions. This OER (open educational resource) gives you the close reading, analytical, and research techniques you will need to join the ongoing literary conversations between writers, critics, theorists, activists, historians, directors, professors, librarians, and scholars of all sorts.

“Artistic Merit” and “Quality”

If you look up a definition of “literature,” you may notice that several definitions include an evaluative component: in order to be literature, a text must not only include words as a major way of delivering content and meaning, but the text must also adhere to some sort of standard. What are these so-called standards, and who gets to determine them?

Historically, texts that are re-printed and regularly studied at schools and universities represent part of what literary scholars call the canon. This term refers to all the works of literature that you likely have heard of, even if you’ve never read them or even plan to read them. (“Canon” can also refer to the “authoritative list of books forming the Judeo-Christian Bible” and “a list of works by a single author,” but the more debatable meaning is of most interest here.^[2]) Canonical works in English include the plays of William Shakespeare, the novels of Melville and Dickens, the short stories of Poe and Hawthorne, and the poetry of Milton and Tennyson. In short, the canon has, for many years, comprised mostly white men who lived in England and America from the 1600s to the 1900s. However, many communities of readers work to resuscitate lost and forgotten authors, thereby redefining the canon and undermining the bias the traditional canon shows towards a particular demographic.

Who was it that decided which authors and works could be canonical and which could not? As with any institutional structure, the texts that got chosen were of most interest to communities of readers who had both the leisure to read and the resources to distribute their thoughts about what they had read. The ability to create and publish a work of literature correlates with an author’s access to education, financial and temporal resources, and/or connections to the publishing industry. All of these factors have historically favored men’s voices over women’s voices, white people’s voices over the voices of people of color, heteronormative voices over queer voices, upper-class voices over working-class voices, and voices that adhere to what have been considered learned conventions over those that do not.

Different communities of readers will determine their own criteria for what counts as appropriate quality for a work of literature. For some, “quality” refers to the depth of content; for others, the priority is a text’s power to effect change, whether in society or in a particular art form; for still others, it’s the aesthetic pleasure of the sound or image of the text. Of course, many will also judge the merits of a written text by its presentation, which includes both the author’s attention to things like grammar and mechanics as well as the platform that the work is published on. For much of the country’s history, the U.S. literary canon exclusively reflected the stylistic and grammatical norms of formal English, which in turn derive from wealthy, white, New England dialects. Written work published through traditional print structures such as a major press is frequently considered more “literary” (or at least of higher quality) than work that is available only online or self-published by an author.

Yet “popular” should not be antithetical to “literary.” Several now-canonical texts originated as popular fare aimed at non-elite audiences. Shakespeare’s plays are but one example—in modern terms, he’s more of a Steven Spielberg as opposed to a Spike Lee or Hayao Miyazaki, meaning that he wrote popular blockbusters as opposed to being an auteur. Novels too were frequently considered “fluff” by their contemporaries. In an article in The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes that “it’s an old story stretching back to the days when the novel was seen as a low form, fit to be practiced by women. The thinking man wrote poetry and philosophical treatises.” Coates also observes,

And then as the novel moved into respectability the contribution of women to the genre was often met with derision. Nathaniel Hawthorne sums up a feeling which, regrettably, remains with us today: ‘America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash—and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed.^[3]

You will find this discussed in more depth in our chapters on the novella and the novel. Kate Chopin’s novella The Awakening (1899) was not considered literature at the time it was published, but almost a century later, with ideas about literature undergoing significant change, it became part of the canon. While we might view a novel like Jane Eyre (1847) as literature, it came to be considered so in part because Charlotte Brontë published it under the pseudonym “Currer Bell.” This name signaled to readers that the author was not one of the “damned mob of scribbling women” and therefore should be taken seriously. Like novels, genres like science fiction and fantasy were once considered too “lowbrow” and popular, but they now enjoy a great deal of commercial and critical success, thanks to writers such as Ray Bradbury and Samuel Delany who blur the line between the popular and the literary.

As with art in general, literature becomes literature when someone with power treats it as literary. This “someone” in question does not have to be the original author; indeed, much of what gets to be considered literary is determined by various gatekeepers, including publishers, teachers, government officials, and other creators who have been deemed literary enough to participate. Hence, a string of code or several text messages could become a piece of literature, even if their original creators never intended for them to be read as such.