The Importance of Literature: Exploring its Definition and Impact on Society
While it may not be particularly obvious at first, there is a huge debate over what literature actually is. A first thought may be that anything written is literature, but that would include post-it notes and recipe cards, or even text messages and road signs. Is Shakespeare literature? Most would say yes. Is poetry literature? Of course, right? What about the poem that an eight year old writes for her mother? Is that literature? Well, of course not, but then does that mean that only some poetry is literature and some is not?
If one desires to study a given subject, it seems important to first define that subject. In order to define the subject, in this case, ‘literature,’ one must be able to identify the elements that make it, specifically, what makes it distinct from other systems (Sadowski 1999: 43). But how can someone do this without knowing what literature is and what it is not? Unfortunately, this can only be accomplished by analyzing the assumptions and interpretive functions that readers have historically assigned to texts of literature (Culler 200: 25).
Historical Debate Concerning the Meaning and Analysis of ‘Literature’
The debate as to what is and what is not literature will not be solved any time soon, but the history of literary theory is quite revealing. Before 1800, ‘literature’ and related terms simply meant ‘things written’ or a reference to ‘book learning’ (Culler 2000: 29), and even in academics today a ‘literature review’ refers to the review of written scholarly works on a specific topic. After that point, there came a change in an understanding of what truly made writings ‘literature.’
The Imaginative
By the Romantic Period, the idea of ‘literature’ came to be equated explicitly with the ‘imaginative’ (Ferdinal et al. 2020: 6), that is, fiction. This can be traced to German Romanticists during the end of the eighteenth century, but more specifically to a French Baroness by the name of Madame de Staël whose book, On Literature Considered in its Relations with Social Institutions, describes the imaginative literariness that is understood today (Culler 2000: 21).
It was once believed that truly literary works refer not to historical individuals but to imaginary ones, such as Huckleberry Finn and Emma Bovary (Culler 2000: 31). Even today some describe the literary genre specifically as poetry, drama, or prose fiction (Meyer 2018: 4). Interestingly, the literary critic David Masson, who was for a short time a contemporary with Charles Dickens, criticized Dickens for risking the purity of his art through the polemicization and moralizing of his works (Downs 2015: 9), that is, writing beyond the scope of literature.
This fictionality in literature was not limited merely to characters and events; the familiarizing features of a language that relate to utterances, adverbials discussing place and time, such as ‘here,’ ‘now,’ or ‘tomorrow,’ and pronouns, such as ‘I’ or ‘you,’ function differently in literature (Culler 2000: 31). In academic writing today, using these terms is often discouraged as the reader may or may not relate when the writer argues subjectively or emotionally, for instance the statement “you should understand that…” or “when I go there.” These rather personal statements may cause an argument to lose its persuasiveness in an academic setting. On the contrary, within fiction writing, the very subjectiveness of those statements is precisely called for. The reader does not understand these statements literally, of course. Rather, the reader understands the fictionality of the literary setting of the work. ‘I’ does not refer to the writer but to the fictional narrator who may be altogether different from the author. These ‘deictics,’ as they are called, utilize contextual parameters built into the fictional work (Diessel 2012: 1-2). Thus, in fiction, the relationship between what the author believes and what the fictional speaker says depends on one’s interpretation (Culler 2000: 31).
Unfortunately, what is commonly detailed as ‘literature,’ even at the time of Masson, includes far more than the ‘imaginative,’ such as Francis Bacon’s essays, John Donne’s sermons, and the spiritual autobiography of John Bunyan (Eagleton 2003: 1), let alone the polemicizing of Dickens. The defining of literature as the imaginative does not seem to work in reality, particularly as writing imaginatively includes texts not considered to be literature, such as movie scripts (Sadowski 1999: 54) or comics (Eagleton 2003: 2).
Belles Lettres
Another attempt to define literature stems from a movement toward what could be considered ‘fine writing,’ or belles lettres. Thus, Thomas Babington Macaulay, who wrote poetry about heroic deeds in Roman history, and Charles Lamb, the essayist and playwright, might act as examples of belles lettres, with their beautiful and captivating styles, but Charles Darwin and Karl Marx, whose works were said to lack a sense of beauty in their verbiage, would not be considered literature at all (Eagleton 2003: 9). The essence of belles lettres was that it was a special kind of writing that was exemplary in its use of rhetoric and language, writing moving beyond mere fiction and including fine writing, and perhaps therefore thinking, in sermons, histories, speeches, and philosophies (Culler 2000: 21). The change is evident in the criticisms of Dickens, who though wrote polemics and morals, was said to have an instinct for the beautiful (Downs 2015: 9). Even today, any textbook on British Literature, French Literature, or American Literature does not include legal documents, scholarly writings, or telephone books but rather includes “artistic” or “aesthetic” works, concluding the definition of the term literature by these additional adjectives (Klarer 2004: 1) rather than the more etymological meaning of a thing consisting of letters.
By 1840, composition was seen as both a science and an art that included principles of sublimity and beauty (Downs 2015: 1). In 1880, Matthew Arnold, an Oxford academic, gave to poetry, and therefore literature, an almost sacred function, building upon the Romantic poets before him who had ascribed a rather visionary status to the genre, one that receded to the classics, giving literature something akin to special powers (Bertens 2002: 2-3). To him, literature was a ‘product’ of living in a high culture and could be thought of as the best of thought and language (Ferdinal et al. 2020: 77). ‘Fine writing,’ although ambiguous, is that writing style that is highly regarded, yet if true literature is always understood to be exemplary writing, a natural product of living in the highest of cultures, why is there such a category as ‘bad literature’ (Eagleton 2003: 9)? Shouldn’t all literature, by nature of its beauty, be good?
Interestingly, just as Charles Dickens was accused of risking literature by moving beyond simple imaginative writing (Downs 2015: 9), Jean-Paul Sartre, in more recent times, was accused of murdering literature by moving beyond belles-lettres (Sartre 1950: 4). In reality, the fall of belles lettres as a definition for literature dates back quite some time, nineteenth century literary criticism, being highly influenced by the belles lettres concept, had already began to create informal aesthetic principles of rhetorical theory (Downs 2015: 3), both limiting writing and moving literary criticism closer to a structuralist concept, separating belles lettres-critique from the rhetorical foundations of belles lettres.
The Structured Approach
During the early twentieth century, particularly after the first world war, a new type of structuralist argument was made, Russian Formalism (Ferdinal et al. 2020: 77). Seeking a more objective discussion of literary criticism, Russian Formalists recognized the structural analysis of a text as the most important form of analysis (Klarer 2004: 82), identifying how literature can be differentiated from non-literature writings through form or feature (Ferdinal et al. 2020: 77-78), these literary forms somewhat continuing the belles lettres definition (cf. Allen 2003: 18). Rather than a truly ‘fine writing,’ per belles lettres, the ‘literary’ is understood to be an intensification of everyday speech, deviating systematically from ordinary language and drawing attention to itself by flaunting its material being (Eagleton 2003: 2). According to this theoretical approach, the writing of literature has no basis in ingenuity, imagination, or intuition, and the historical or sociological context bears little on our understanding of it; on the contrary, the literary critic should approach the text as a completely independent entity (Klarer 2004: 82).
This dissociation of art from mystery concerned itself not with religion, psychology, or sociology, but rather with the organization or structure of language; literature was not seen as a medium of ideology but as a dissectible entity whose individual parts, or words, are devoid of feeling (Eagleton 2003: 2). All external context to the writing had no influence upon the text. Within Russian Formalism, the text itself is of upmost importance, and verbal strategies create literariness, redirecting from the author of the work to the verbal devices within it, these being the true heroes of the text (Culler 2000: 122). For example, Don Quixote is not concerned with a character of the same name; the character is simply the device that holds the differing narrative techniques together (Eagleton 2003: 3).
In a similar vein, the theoretical approaches within the New Criticism movement, of the American and British schools, disregarded any and all authorial intention and emphasized literature as objects utterly separate from the former, showing the individual elements that create the unified structure of the work (Culler 2000: 122). Thus, external aspects of the work matter little; the student of literature merely focuses upon the text and discusses plot, symbols, irony, and other literary devices (Ferdinal et al. 2020: 78).
The New Criticism of the 1930s and 1940s created an enduring legacy that lead to the formation of a plethora of additional theoretical perspectives; beginning in the 1960s, these include phenomenology, psychoanalysis, linguistics, Marxism, feminism, and structuralism (Culler 2000: 122). Within Phenomenology, there was the search for the unchanging essence of a thing, not in an abstract way but rather the concreteness of an object (Eagleton 2003: 48) within the world created by the author’s consciousness and manifested throughout that author’s works (Culler 2000: 123). Thus, a green apple can be described by the very greenness of green, a ‘thing’ that exists separate from all other things (Sartre 1950: 8).
Phenomenology boasted upon experiential evidences that could lead to genuine knowledge (Eagleton 2003: 49). The approach was understood as a science of phenomena (Eagleton 2003: 48), and like many other of these strategies, the philosophical discussion of literary phenomena continues today (Ferdinal et al. 2020: 75). Just as with New Criticism, within phenomenological criticism, historical context, authorial production, and even readership are disregarded in favor of a completely immanent, or intrinsic, reading of the text (Eagleton 2003: 51), though the reader’s experience of this literary world tends to create that very world (Culler 2000: 123).
As a reaction to such phenomenological arguments came Structuralism (Culler 2000: 124). Here, the deep structure included rules, models, and grammar that existed in contrast to simple surface phenomena that could be considered accidental and variable (Preucel 2010: 93-94). Structuralism utilized a linguistic strategy that interpreted literature as a concrete example of an abstract system whereby the critic could break down the structure of the writing, explain the genre, identify the signs, and demonstrate both its semantic and syntactic aspects (Ferdinal et al. 2020: 78). More specifically, the theory concerned itself with the examination of the general laws by which structures existed (Eagleton 2003: 82).
Rather than a phenomenological consciousness, structuralism searched for unconscious ‘structures,’ such as those related to language, the psyche, and even unconscious structures within society (Culler 2000: 124). Because of this, Structuralism lead into other related theories, such as those in connection with psychoanalysis, putting to use the ideology behind Freudian unconsciousness, and even Marxist proposals (Preucel 2010: 94). It should be noted that within the structural theories, ‘literature’ was understood to be completely different from all other forms of language usage, existing as a non-pragmatic discourse with its own grammatical regulations that may or may not be used in everyday speech (Sadowski 1999: 44).
A Poststructural Response
As one might suspect, the rigidity of the structuralistic approaches effectuated a response, and although labeled differently depending upon the author, the differing poststructural methods, stemming from a dissatisfaction with the paradigms (Shackel and Little 1992: 5), all began from a critique of Structuralism (Preucel 2010: 122). This is not to say that poststructuralists utterly reject all of Structuralism but rather question the objectivity of the former (Allison 1999: 14). In fact, the movement accepts major tenets of Structuralism, and within some models, Poststructuralism is subsumed under Structuralism, understood as both a continuation and a rejection of the latter (Bertens 2002: 119).
The Poststructuralist movement can perhaps be better understood as a reorganization of the then-defined Structuralist school of thought as theorists moved beyond the narrowly conceived structure of the theory (Culler 2000: 125). As theorists, they attempted to find common ground between functionalism, which emphasized ecology and economics, and high structuralism, which emphasized the rules of interpretation (Hodder 2007: 7). Poststructuralists continued the Structuralist fixation on language (Bertens 2002: 120), but now literature is understood to be a ‘self-referential’ form that has no relationship to reality outside of language itself (Sadowski 1999: 44). Thus, it separated itself from Structuralism in that the poststructural theoretical discourses critiqued the concept of objective knowledge (Culler 2000: 125).
The text is understood to be comprised of a system of signs, language functioning through representation where a mental image is manifested verbally; for example, the mental image of a tree, referred to as the signified, is verbally manifested as a signifier using a sequence of radicals or sounds, in English these being the letters t-r-e-e (Klarer 2004: 87). In this belief, meaning is always absent from its sign; it is never fully present and is in a constant state of flux (Eagleton 2003: 111) as words change and concepts expand. Since this signifying system is constantly changing within a society, Poststructuralists recognize that any complete description of the system is an impossibility, and since cultural phenomena is understood to be unintelligible, the emphasis is instead placed upon the critique of knowledge itself (Culler 2000: 133).
The approach became an interpretive discipline (Tringham 2015: 6928), allowing for very many different interpretations and meanings of a single dataset (Pruecel 1995: 148). As such, it has given way to new disciplines, contemporary versions of feminism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, and historicism (Culler 2000: 125). Because of this, there is an attempt to open the door to alternative voices and new avenues of discussion (Lawrence 1999: 122) seeking explanations for systemic relationships, finding meaning from the perspective of the actor, and exposing ideological structures (Preucel 1995: 150), including from the feminist perspective (Conkey and Spector 1984: 3).
Current Theories
Of the multiple past theories, there are strengths and weaknesses, and rather than a rejection or a replacement of the facets of the previous theory, each built upon the former to advance an understanding (Harris and Cipolla 2017: 3-4), and each brought a greater sophistication and even real world relevance to interpretation (Bentley and Maschner 2007: 3). In the new millennium, the war between these differing theories has seemingly come to an end, but while terms such as Structural and Poststructural are no longer emphasized, tenets of those former theories carry over into today.
Although there has been a call to free oneself from any one theoretical position (Bintliff and Pearce, 2011: 6), there still exist theoretical frameworks from which current scholars practice their views (Harris and Cipolla 2017: 1). Three of the more common amongst these current theories are a New Materialism, which is primarily an ontological approach, an Intersectionality, which is primarily a political move away from Western-oriented philosophies, and a Philosophical Pragmatism, which is a move away from excessively abstract formulations (Johnson 2016: 1-6).
New Materialism
One current theoretical approach to interpretation involves ‘things.’ This New Materialism has been nomenclated with various titles, often including the term ‘turn,’ such as ‘the ontological turn’ or ‘the turn to things’ (Harris and Cipolla, 2017: 4) and includes several approaches, such as vitalism, actor-network theory, and object-oriented ontology (Ribeiro 2019: 26). As a theory, this borrows heavily from Poststructural thought—poststructuralists say ‘text’ but materialists say ‘matter’ (Kaczmarski 2019: 210)—but New Materialism is distinguished in that it rejects the emphasis on human exceptionalism, that is ‘things’ are merely material symbols of culture (Thomas 2015: 1287-88). Instead, the philosophical move is toward placing ‘things’ at center stage (Pétursdóttir and Olsen 2018: 99) where things have their own existence that transcends a human-object correlation (Ribeiro 2019: 26). Thus, when approaching a text, one must begin with the concept of non-human agency, dismissing our individual or collective subjectivity and the human-oriented agency that humans possess (Kaczmarski 2019: 211). Therefore, this turn is a search for the underlying character of entities in the world, human or not (Thomas 2015: 1290), and the relational nature of reality itself (Ribeiro 2019: 26).
While the differing approaches within this theory are not uniform, they all share the starting point of ridding oneself of western, dualistic thought (Harris and Cipolla, 2017: 5). It includes a rejection of classical humanist dichotomies such as culture-nature and human-animal (Harrison-Buck and Hendon 2018: 3). Rather than differing cultural beliefs about one material world, which is understood as a western colonization of the past (Jervis 2018: 5), differing things inhabit differing worlds with multiple ontologies (Thomas 2015: 1290). Thus, the concept is such that the modern, western scholar must be capable of stepping away from his or her western mindset and be open to other truths (Jervis 2018: 4) rather than silence or disregard other ontologies that may exist (Gnecco 2019: 1665).
New Materialism is both anti-theoretical and anti-methodical (Kaczmarski 2019: 214), these relating to human agency. This ‘ahumanization’ of things leads to questions of correlationism, specifically, since human minds, of whatever people group, order raw data, is it possible to understand the world outside of our own correlation with it (Thomas 2015: 1291)? The answer is yes, but through speculation.
Speculative realism is this attempt to speculate beyond human limits, or human-object correlation, and thus beyond the phenomenal world (Edgeworth 2016: 93-94). This is possible because within reality there is no single, fundamental correlation but numerous relations between things (Marila 2014: 12). These things remain withdrawn relationally (Marila 2017: 70), and may be inaccessible to human interpretation without the aid of non-human perceivers (Edgeworth 2016: 97). Thus, other things help the theorist understand the thing studied, which is to say that the relations between the thing studied and the other thing may be understood through human-‘other thing’ relations. These ‘things’ within literature not being limited to the text itself. The practitioner of this theory must be careful. Seeking to speculate about a thing within its own ontology can be difficult as attempting to adopt the object’s ontology may reify a different dichotomy, colonially abducting its reality (Jervis 2018: 5).
Intersectionality
The foundational principle of intersectionality is to understand the past in the present, often through lenses unfamiliar to many. Since the 1980s, it was known that understanding the past is wrapped in contemporary concerns, including social, cultural, and political, and this became increasingly realized with diverse contributions to the humanities (Johnson 2016: 5), whether theoretical (White 2014: 255) or actual.
The origins of most literature studied today, and in fact the origins of scholarship of those works, is that of the white, European man, but as scholarship is no longer merely performed by white European men, a renewed interest in the politics of literary theory have been generated. With the general call to diversify knowledge sets within academia, for some, engagement in diversification became a necessity that, whether desired or not, resulted in embracement (Johnson 2016: 5). This embrace eventually welcomed the intersection of marginalized people into well established fields which today includes not only differing colors of skin but also disabilities, sexual orientation, economic status, and more (Rivera Prince et al. 2022: 385).
The results of such an endeavor come through the multiplicity of interpretations via perspectives that may not be considered normal to many in the discipline, including feminist and queer theory (Doğan, Pereira, and Antczak 2022: vi), indigenous perspectives (Johnson 2016: 5), gender theories (Bentley and Maschner 2007: 4), and others from minoritized backgrounds (Rivera Prince et al. 2022: 389). Thus, interpretations based on beliefs other than western thought bring new perspectives to the table, giving an equity where previously there was inequity (cf. Rivera Prince et al. 2022: 383).
Philosophical Pragmatism
Pragmatism, in general, concerns the theory of meaning (Queiroz and Merrell 2006: 37), and although not a unified field, this distinct American philosophy generally holds that meaning is determined by the practical consequences of an idea or action (Preucel and Mrozowski 2010: 28). The study of the ancient utilizes logical reasoning in order to give meaning to the object of study, no matter the theoretical practices followed (Preucel 2010: 2), but pragmatists remain leery of excessively abstract formulations that have no real-world application (Johnson 2016: 2). As such, pragmatists reject the idea that philosophical insight can lead to unchangeable foundations to knowledge (Baert 2005: 192), such as dogmatic beliefs, since, after all, humans are fallible (Queiroz and Merrell 2006: 38), and according to pragmatists, knowledge is humanly conditioned (Johnson 2016: 2).
Instead, the focus of pragmatism has been on the science of signs, or semiotics (Agbe-Davies 2017: 11), which has opened new paths to empirical study (Tamm and Preucel 2023: 49). This is not to say that a search for signs is a search for an arbitrary, disembodied mental association; instead, pragmatists believe that the significative meaning of objects can be physically apparent in qualitative ways (Iliopoulos 2016: 246). In other words, they search for signs rather than symbols. Thus, the philosophy of pragmatism in literary studies concerning ancient cultures involves a practical understanding of those past cultures and their literature where the meaning of signs can be determined through the consequences of past actions (Preucel and Mrozowski 2010: 28).
The inherent implication of pragmatic semiosis is that it is a process (Queiroz and Merrell 2006: 39). As such, it incorporates deduction and induction, but also abduction, which is a combination of the two; rather than simply deducting based on premises or inducting based on empirical evidences, abduction allows for postulation concerning the causes of things observed (Agbe-Davies 2017: 22). Pragmatism is the process of reasoning that fixes the meaning of abstract ideas to concrete experiences (Iliopoulos 2016: 247) and therefore offers a path beyond unrestrained idealism and unrestrained empiricism (Johnson 2016: 2). It is an attempt to mediate between the differing approaches (Webmoor 2007: 233-38), and therefore if pragmatism offers nothing else, it should give rise to clarity (White, 2014: 264).
Determining an Approach
Most scholars do not conform to any one theory. Instead, scholars combine methods and theories in which they have come into contact (cf. Bintliff and Pierce 2011: 4). Having come into contact with many differing theoretical approaches, the student, through logical inference of cross-theoretical contact, creates his own theory, building upon those of the past.
Structuralism is enticing due to its empirical approach; it would be nice if everything fit so well into black and white boxes. Unfortunately, unrestrained empiricism is quite lacking. If empiricism is observation and repetition through experimentation (Henry 1854: 327), then literary criticism cannot be empirical, unless one chooses to dismiss authorial intention and context.
One can understand why Poststructuralism was a necessary counter-theory to Structuralism, specifically the questioning of the objectivity of empiricism (Allison 1999: 14), and while Poststructuralism was not the result of a complete paradigm shift from one science to another (cf. Shanks 2007: 133), there were key differences in the theoretical approaches.
Poststructuralism rejects the concept that literary theory is merely a science and embraces inquiry into symbols, identity, and multiple meanings (cf. Harris and Cipolla 2017: 3), and it ‘rehumanized’ studies (cf. Shackel and Little 1992: 5), allowing for a recapturing of distinctive human qualities (Preucel 1995: 147). While one can commend the strive to interpret through both materialist and idealist positions (Johnson 2020: 113), the allowance of multiple, valid interpretations based on a single dataset (Pruecel 1995: 148) becomes confusing, especially the promoting of a relativistic and unknowable past (Bintliff 1993: 92). The same can be said of the New Materialism. The reliance on metaphysical philosophy (Ribeiro 2019: 26) makes the theory somewhat incomprehensible. Additionally, the ahuminanization of objects has lead to the dehumanizing of the subject at study (cf. Jervis 2018: 4).
The intersectionality of differing perspectives humanizes the past. Truly, one may have deeper insight than another into an interpretation of differing actions depending upon the life experiences of the one, including sex, economic status, race, culture, etc., and intersectionality has successfully represented the fluidity of power and identity dynamics (Spencer-Wood and Trunzo 2022: 6), even to the point of introducing queer perspectives that had been taboo beforehand (Rutecki and Blackmore 2016: 9). Unfortunately, research is marred by accusations of racism (cf. Blakey 2020: S183; Flewellen et al. 2021: 230-34), sexism (cf. Conkey and Spector 1984: 3; Wylie 1997: 80), etc., which are sometimes true, but do nothing to bring unity to the discipline. Rather than the open perspective of marginalized and minoritized individuals, the approach often dismisses everything but these individuals.
It is, perhaps, the pragmatic approach that is most appealing. Pragmatism includes both empiricism and idealism, but restrains the two (Johnson 2016: 2) through logical perspective (Preucel 2010: 2), including inductive, deductive, and abductive reasoning in order to postulate causes and effects (Agbe-Davies 2017: 22). While the propensity of the theory to dismiss determinations (Saitta 2014: 6116) may lead to charges of hyper-relativism (Preucel and Bauer 2001: 93), this can be remedied by the assertion that some things can be known.
‘Literature’ as a Means of Social Reproduction
One of these knowable concepts is that humans create for a reason. Contrary to past theoretical beliefs, people are not a product of their circumstances but are in fact contributors to them (Bandura 2006: 164). Obviously humanity, and therefore the works of humanity, are embedded in social, cultural, ideological, and material relationships (Boyes, Steele, and Astoreca 2021: 1) that we can refer to as context, but the dispute over ‘agency’ is important to the debate, ‘agency’ asking the question as to what extent humans are responsible for their own actions (Culler 2000: 45). For some, humans are guided by the natural world around them and therefore have no true free will (Åhnebrink 1961: vi-vii). They may react to forces upon them, but they are utterly helpless to them (cf. Zhang 2010: 195). For others, there is a sense in which human agency is both free and determined (Dolphijn and Tuin 2012: 55).
In reality, it can be argued that humans make choices not determined by their context but within their context, social, cultural, ideological, and material. More clearly stated, choices are susceptible to context (Thomadsen et al. 2018: 3), but rather than the context determining ideas and behaviors, ideas and behaviors are determined on the individual level (cf. Aldenderfer 1998: 105), individuals, and their households, producing the external context (Souvatzi 2008: 32).
Within societies are socials ideals that represent the society often referred to as a social identity, these being taxonomical categorizations that separate a society from other societies (Voss 2005: 461). These ideals are naturally reproduced within a society through a process referred to as social reproduction which is the reinforcing of proper ideas and behaviors (Toren 2005: 770). Many of these social reproductive strategies are unconscious since individuals within a society tend to mimic those around them, particularly children to their parents. Of course, conflict often arises within a community, and because the range of conflict may be simple or devastating, social reproduction is not an obvious conclusion but an ever-changing reaction that shapes the individual and the society as a whole (Souvatzi 2008: 44), sometimes even being purposefully introduced, as in the case in establishing law codes.
Many forms of literature appear to have a social reproductive objective (cf. Weiss 2021: 1). While not all literature deals with moral or polemical concepts, authors, through their writing, attempt to move their audiences (Nelson 2007: 30). Generally speaking, an author persuades, records, and conveys ideas and information (Boscolo and Hidi 2007: 3), or as Cicero has stated, to teach, to delight, and to persuade (Cicero 1968: 366).
The 16th c. critic Sir Philip Sidney noted that literature both educated and entertained the readers, exalting literature above history and philosophy (Ferdinal et al. 2020: 76-77). This is noted when one scholar refers to a society’s literature as the noise of that society, but also its information (Culler 2000: 40). Literature has the potential to dignify and enculture a society (Ferdinal et al. 2020: 88).
Within ancient literature, this is particularly so, notably in the case of ancient epics, myths, and legal texts, where religious belief is directly tied into epics and myths and where legal texts candidly discourage violations of cultural conventions. Other ancient genres also encourage the reproduction of societal beliefs, including treaties, which include factors of social identification, historical texts, which very often direct the readers viewpoint through the use of hyperbolic language, and even letters and poems, where the author attempts to move the intended audience toward his perspective. Ultimately, ancient literature should be understood to be reproducing one’s culture in the next generation, whether directly or indirectly intended.
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[This is a lecture written for the course 'ARCH 209: Literature of the Ancient Near East,' taught Spring 2025 at God's Bible School and College, a regionally accredited College in Cincinnati, Ohio. Bibliographical material will be posted under Research on this site.]
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