Many modern literary theorists refuse to define their terms, even such basic terms as the word “literature” itself. Take for example this passage from a standard college textbook, Robert Parker’s How To Interpret Literature: “There is no exact, definitive…meaning for the term literature…For the purposes of this book, literature is simply those things we refer to by the word literature.”1
This, of course, is a laughable and circular definition, and it essentially constitutes a refusal to define. Even the basic definition from Merriam-Webster is far better: “Literature: writings in prose or verse especially : writings having excellence of form or expression and expressing ideas of permanent or universal interest. ‘literature stands related to man as science stands to nature— J. H. Newman.’” There. That wasn’t so hard.
But when literary theorists do define literature, it’s even worse. I came across an interesting thread on, of all places, the Q&A website Quora. Someone had posed the question, “What is the strength and the weaknesses of this definition of literature: ‘literature is a form of textual-making’?”
Now, “literature is a form of textual-making” is exactly the kind of dehumanized and dehumanizing, unartistic,“sciencized,” jargon-filled, missing-the-forest-for-the-trees, inscrutable, and meaningless type of definition that epitomizes what modern literary theory has become. It is academese in the worst sense. This is just one of the reasons that I am no admirer of modern literary theory (see here, here, and here for more reasons).
Now, observe this brilliant reply from an English teacher named Harlan Holmes. It’s worth quoting in full:
A “form of textual-making”? What a sad excuse for thought! What an absolutely vacuous, insipid, and pedestrian idea! Banish it from your mind immediately!
Its only strength lies in alerting you to the fact that you should save your money by dropping whatever course you are currently taking. Its weaknesses are myriad, but I’ll try to sum them up: your instructor is disseminating shallow, pretentious, and pseudo-pedagogical BS (bovine feces).
Find a teacher with enough wisdom and insight to share inspiring definitions of great literature: “Literature is knowledge brought to the heart” [Wordsworth, I think]. It is a “record of the best and happiest thoughts of the best and happiest minds” [Shelley]. It is a “narrative that moves from overclothed blindness to a naked vision,” revealing “a portrait of the human heart — every page a pulse!” [Dylan Thomas]
Or these about the novel: “The novel is like a crystal, for in it we can see the concentrated beauty of the world.” According to Jane Austen, the greatest novelist who ever lived [agree to disagree on this point], it is a “work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.”
And when we endeavor to speak of poetry, we must raise our game even more for poetry is the queen of all the literary arts. Poetry should “begin in delight and end in wisdom” for it is above all “the art of uniting pleasure to truth.” To Carlyle it was “musical thought”; Poe envisioned it as “the rhythmical creation of beauty” and for Robinson it was “language that tells us something that cannot be said.”
Now, when you read those, did you feel something stir? That was your spirit being lifted out of the terrestrial muck in which modern, soulless pseudo-education is mired. Cherish it!
This is pure gold, with which I could not agree more (aside from the Austen comment—Austen is great, but not the greatest of all novelists).
Hats off to Holmes.
Robert Dale Parker. How to Interpret Literature: Critical Theory for Literary and Cultural Studies, Second edition (Oxford University Press, 2008), 4.