This university offers a multitude of courses covering the literatures of various cultures and movements. I’ve gladly attended them, eager to learn what I can from the texts and the discussions. But nowhere in this lively, academic conversation have I ever heard a definition of just exactly what “literature” is.
What is literature? Brown does not offer a simple answer. In the current academic climate, such questions are shunned because they tend to lead to the creation of false dichotomies,
separating the written word into literature and not literature. This is postmodernism’s greatest taboo. Like other social products such as pornography and fine art, literature isn’t easy to define, but
we tend to know it when we see it. A step back will help:
What is the purpose of language? A conventional definition will tell you that it exists to convey meaning by encoding it in words. If we accept the premise that literature is the highest expression of written language, then literature is characterized by a high density of meaning. Just as density is the amount of substance packed into a given space, the degree to which a work is literary is proportional to the amount of meaning packed into the words. This premise
should be controversial because of its extreme simplicity, but we can examine the canonical works of literature to prove the correctness of this rough test. Moby Dick, Othello, The Illiad and Gravity’s Rainbow, to name a few, all display a remarkable density of meaning, layering allusions and metaphors over the text, allowing the careful reader to uncover new connections and extract new insights with each rereading. It’s easy to see the connection with a much older heuristic for the literary quality of books: “Some books you read once and are done with; some books you read again and again.”
Literature is the body of works that are packed thick with meaning. This guideline is our most powerful tool in the investigation of literary systems.
