Eagleton – Introduction: What is Literature?
p. 1 – Eagleton begins by posing the question: what is literature? He tells us that “[t]here have been various attempts to define literature”, that is can be thought of as “‘imaginative’ writing”, or “fiction – writing which is not literally true”. He then discusses why this can’t be the case, i.e., that literature includes many writings which are not classified as fiction or fictional in nature. Eagleton brings up “early Icelandic sagas” as an example of a narrative which is both “historical” and “artistic”. As he moves into the second page he notes that in the late 1500s-early 1600s the word “novel” was used to describe both fiction and nonfiction, and that news reports at that time often included exaggerations and outright lies.
p. 2 – This page begins with more examples of texts which blur the lines of fact and fiction that could qualify as literature. Eagleton writes that “Superman comics […] are fictional but not generally regarded as literature, and certainly not as Literature.” This distinction should make you wonder, what is “literature” and what is “Literature”? What is the difference between them? Why is this important? Eagleton raises another disadvantage with the habit of describing literature as “creative” or “imaginative,” that it implies that other fields of study are not creative and not imaginative. Why might this be a problem?
Eagleton then suggests that maybe another approach could help us figure out how to define literature. He writes “[p]erhaps literature is definable […] because it uses language in peculiar ways.” In other words, maybe we know something is literature when we see that its language is different from the way we use language in ordinary, everyday life. In case you haven’t noticed yet, every time Eagleton comes up with a possible solution to his question about literature, he will then go step by step in thinking it through. It’s almost like the scientific method and testing out a hypothesis.
Eagleton gives a little bit of background information before he tests his theory about literature being language used in strange ways. He tells us about people called “formalists” and gives us some of their history. You can go back to the reading for trivia, but the most important thing to know about the Formalists and Formalism is that it was an official trend in literary criticism (the academic study of literature) that studied “how literary texts actually worked,” instead of what they meant, or what they said about the human condition. Formalists were only concerned with the machinery of literature, not its greater meaning or contribution to the meaning of life.
p. 3 – Formalism was an extension of linguistic study; just like linguists study languages and how they work with regards to their structures and rules, Formalist critics wanted to examine literature in the same way. Eagleton explains that instead of an author writing a story the way that would best express the motion or meaning of a text, Formalists believed that an author’s desire to tell a story was an excuse to use a certain format. This was opposite to the prevailing view of the time—that form follows content, or the purpose of the writing. Eagleton gives the example of the novel Animal Farm being an “allegory of Stalinism” to most people but Formalists would say that writing a book about Stalinism led to a perfect opportunity to practice writing an allegory.
Eagleton explains that when the Formalists first began work, their point of view on literature was that something like a novel was just an “arbitrary assemblage” of literary devices mashed together. Later on, they would revise their view to see the novel or a poem as a system of literary devices rather than a random mix. Eagleton points out that no matter how the Formalists saw these literary devices working, organized and together or random and weird, that “what all of these elements had in common was their ‘estranging’ or ‘defamiliarizing’ effect”. Eagleton tells us that “what distinguishes [literary language] from other forms of discourse” is that it “‘deformed’ ordinary language in various ways”.
Even though it feels like Eagleton has gotten off-topic by talking about the Formalists, here is where he is making a connection for us. He is going back to what he started talking about at the end of p. 2 when he speculates if what defines literature is that it “uses language in peculiar ways.” The last important point he makes on this page is that there is a paradox to this strange, “peculiar” language. When literature twists and deforms ordinary language, the effect is to create distance between the reader (you) and the text (the book, poem, or chapter you are reading). However, just as the reader feels repelled by language he/she/they may not understand, the reader, at the same time, starts to pay closer attention to that language as they read it over and over to make sense of it. So, even as literary language pushes you away, it also draws you closer.
p. 4 – Eagleton finishes up his discussion of the paradox of literary language and then continues discussing the Formalists. Here is where we find one of my favorite quotes from this chapter, that the Formalists “saw literary language as […] a kind of linguistic violence.” I love this line because I think it creatively describes some of the difficult writing readers sometimes encounter. We sometimes have to read things that seem so immune to meaning that it feels like we are reading a foreign language. To make an English speaker, an English “understander”, feel like they are reading a foreign language a person would definitely have to “torture” the language and the reader!
Eagleton brings up an important point here. He says that being able to see how an author is “deviating” from “normal” language to create literary language implies that there is a “normal” language. However, even in a small community like the SAE, you can see that this isn’t true. I speak differently than my students. Seniors at the DTC speak differently from students at the middle school, the teachers in different departments use language differently depending on the subject they teach. However, we are all (supposedly) speaking English. What then is “normal” language? Eagleton says that the “idea that there is a single ‘normal’ language […] is an illusion”. What do you think?
p. 5 – Eagleton assures us that the Russian Formalists knew that there is not one normal language that everyone uses, all the time, everywhere. Eagleton argues that, for the Formalists, “‘literariness’ was a function of the differential relations between one sort of discourse and another”. This almost sounds to me like the Formalists were applying math principles to literature. Eagleton then tells us that the Formalists weren’t actually interested in defining literature, what they wanted to study was “literariness”, or the special way people sometimes use language. Eagleton makes an interesting point here: “There is no ‘literary’ device – metonymy, synecdoche, litotes, chiasmus and so on – which is not” also used frequently in everyday speech.
Think about the things you say to your friends, classmates, and family during the day. What literary devices do you find yourself using? (Metaphor? Simile? Hyperbole?)
Even though we use literary language in everyday speech to help express our emotions, language that is estranging or peculiar is still what the Formalists focused on when thinking about literature. This is important to keep in mind for the next page because that is where Eagleton will start to pick apart this “hypothesis” he has been putting together for us.
p. 6 –Eagleton ends the previous page by pointing out that since normal conversation contains so many instances of “literary” language that it becomes almost impossible to define what is literary and what isn’t. He begins p. 6 by pointing out that “there is no kind of writing which cannot […] be read as estranging,” if you are creative enough. He gives some silly examples that show how straightforward language, such as that on informative signs, can be read strangely to force someone into the same kind of analysis that reading literature requires you to do. He then begins building an example that will lead to his next point on the following page.
p. 7 –Eagleton uses the example of the drunk to show how maybe we can know what literature is by examining what we do to it. If we were to give as much time and attention to a sign telling us to watch our step, or the rules of the parking garage, we are making that text literature by treating it like literature. This is what is meant when he calls literature a “non-pragmatic” discourse. Because studying literature does not serve a concrete purpose like a text written to tell people how to assemble furniture, or how to prevent disease, then it cannot be “objectively” defined. There are rules and expectations for what information should be contained in an instruction manual, just as there are for a medical textbook, but what are the rules for writing literature? Eagleton writes that this “leaves the definition of literature up to how somebody decides to read, not to the nature of what is written.” He finishes making his point at the top of p. 8 by concluding, “What matters may not be where you came from but how people treat you. If they decide that you are literature then it seems that you are, irrespective of what you thought you were.”