Unit+1+The+Art+of+Literature.docVIP

Unit 1 The Art of Literature What is literature? What is not literature? What makes us treat something as literature while dismissing others as non-literature? These questions are rarely answered clearly. This unit focuses on the nature of literature. Part I Text A Lead-in Do you think the following forms of writing can be counted as literature? news report novel research paper diary poem letter Now read Text A and see whether your answers to the previous question will be changed. The Scope and Content of Literature1 Kenneth Rexroth The Scope of Literature Literature is a form of human expression. But not everything expressed in words — even when organized and written down — is counted as literature. Those writings that are primarily informative — technical, scholarly, journalistic — would be excluded from the rank of literature by most, though not all, critics. Certain forms of writing, however, are universally regarded as belonging to literature as an art. Individual attempts within these forms are said to succeed if they possess something called artistic merit and to fail if they do not. The nature of artistic merit is less easy to define than to recognize. The writer need not even pursue it to attain it. On the contrary, a scientific exposition might be of great literary value and a pedestrian poem of none at all. The purest (or, at least, the most intense) literary form is the lyric poem, and after it comes elegiac, epic, dramatic, narrative, and expository verse. Most theories of literary criticism base themselves on an analysis of poetry, because the aesthetic problems of literature are there presented in their simplest and purest form. Poetry that fails as literature is not called poetry at all but verse. Many novels — certainly all the world’s great novels — are literature, but there are thousands that are not so considered. Most great dramas are considered literature (although the Chinese, poss