Let us suppose that literature begins

at the moment when literature becomes

a question.

Maurice Blanchot, this volume p. 321

In this era of global capital triumphant,

to keep responsibility alive in the reading and teaching

of the textual is at first sight impractical.

It is, however, the right of the textual

to be responsible, responsive, answerable.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Every anthology gathers a series of questions. It is not a display of answers. A true question voices a doubt, expressing a desire to know rather than giving expression to that which is known. To ask the right question entails identifying what it is that you don’t know, and sometimes it is only once something apparently known becomes a question – is called into question, we might say – that in a shimmer of hesitation, of uncertainty, or of doubt, the gap makes itself known. This is what the quotation from Blanchot above invites us to think: what if literature only begins when we are no longer sure (what it is), when we suspend certainty, when we allow something to appear that can bear the name of literature without conforming to what we formerly understood by that name? And yet, as the quotation from Spivak that accompanies it reminds us, this does not allow us to abdicate responsibility. Reading and teaching are each activities or (institutional) spaces in which what is called literature – which remains a privileged domain of the textual – makes demands on all those prepared to read and to learn. Bringing these two thinkers and their words here together, we might say: responding to the unknown, unsure of where we are or what exactly it is that is making these demands, may seem, to borrow Spivak’s term, impractical, but it is the only way to keep responsibility alive in the form of the question, that is, by taking the question seriously as a question.

This anthology bears a question as its title: What is literature? It will still sit there as a question on the cover even after you have read some or all of the contents. ‘What is literature?’ is not a new question. It has a history, and in fact it is historically bounded. Who, then, now, might hold the answer, assuming there is one? If we think of literature as a name, what does it name? Turning to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), for example, the clearest definition of the modern understanding of literature is found in entry 3a, which refers to a ‘restricted sense’ of ‘writing which has claim to consideration on the ground of beauty of form or emotional effect’. It then adds, almost as an aside, ‘This sense is of very recent emergence both in Eng[lish] and Fr[ench]’, which is why I referred to it as the modern understanding. This is a sense of the word literature that emerges in modernity, and is inseparable from it. The OED’s definition contains two crucial elements for understanding how the word is commonly used, but doesn’t entirely resolve the question of literature’s identity. Quite the opposite.

‘Beauty of form’ makes us think about the shape or structure of the literary work, and at the same time makes us wonder how to define beauty (What are the criteria? Who decides? Is this a subjective or objective judgement? And so on). Then the definition takes a funny turn as it gives us the second element: ‘or emotional effect’. Emotional effect is broad enough to cover everything from being profoundly moved to faintly irritated, from becoming intensely bored to intermittent anger, excitement, disgust, enchantment, fascination, puzzlement, arousal and despair. We can love a poem or hate a novel. All that seems fine, although we might want to add other possible effects that aren’t purely emotional (bodily reactions, or even, now and then, the odd thought or idea). That’s not the funny bit. The oddity, for me at least, is the ‘or’. Is the form (beautiful or otherwise) not contributing to the effect on the reader? Does it have to be one or the other, either beauty or emotional effect, or is the definition simply saying that you only need one to qualify as literature? In both cases, this is only staking a claim to consideration. Who or what does the considering? How is this claim expressed? Maybe it has to be thought of as a kind of multivocal performance, in which a piece of writing – while being beautiful or making us cry or laugh or inspiring us to hurl it across the room – is also at every moment pointing at itself and inaudibly shouting ‘Look, I’m literature’.

Beauty and emotion are not universal. The dictionary’s use of them recognizes that this is a restricted sense of literature, but it has become the common one for us. For most modern critics, literature ‘as such’ is something that emerges in the long eighteenth century, replacing older categories based on poetics and rhetoric. This is the ‘very recent’ emergence of a sense of the word literature noted by the OED (for whom the eighteenth century remains very recent). The notion of literature in this specific sense is part of the foundations for the Romantic – and at the outset largely German – tradition of treating literature and other arts under the heading of the aesthetic. This tradition is the focus for this volume since its influence on later thinking about art remains decisive, both spawning a strong set of ideas that continue to feature in discussion of art and also producing a powerful allergic reaction in which the whole notion of the aesthetic is repeatedly rejected. The idea, for example, that art can open up the possibility of accessing knowledge or truth that could not be gained by any other means is still regularly proposed and equally persistently contested. The idea, then, that there is something special about art objects which marks them out from ‘ordinary’ objects remains controversial. An equivalent argument in literary studies might be the notion that there is something special about literary language that separates it decisively from ordinary language, or that there is something peculiar about the relation of the author to her or his – or more accurately our – language(s). Even if we believe this, we need to be able to explain why. This is territory repeatedly contested in the texts gathered in this anthology.

***

Any question that takes the form ‘what is . . .?’ asks us to think about the essence of something. In this sense, it is a philosophical question, and certainly there have been many philosophical attempts to define literature (often antagonistically, making clear that philosophy is not, even should not be, literature). In a well‐known passage from Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates suggests that: ‘You must know the truth concerning everything you are speaking or writing about; you must learn how to define each thing in itself; and, having defined it, you must know how to divide it into kinds until you reach something indivisible’. As the citation from the OED indicates, this knowing is not straightforward. What happens if we try to take this prescription and apply it to the discussion of literature?

While their texts do not appear in this anthology, there are two shadows that more than any other have fallen across this question of literature and its definition in the last couple of thousand years. For good or ill, they cannot be ignored. Knowing a little about their central ideas will help in understanding both the terms and the ground of the debates that appear in this book. The tradition of European philosophy that finds its roots in Plato (c. 427–c. 347 BCE) and Aristotle (384–322 BCE) centres on representation in its handling of art and literature – circling around the Greek term mimēsis, which can be translated as either representation or imitation – and is dominated by two issues: can representation bring us any closer to truth, and, what social or political function might representation have? Plato famously has Socrates expel the poets from his Republic, primarily because he thinks that art is fundamentally imitative, and therefore takes us a step away from truth. If we want to know about tables, we learn more by looking at tables than at drawings of tables, for instance. The table is at least made by someone who knows how to make tables. An artist may not even know that much about the object presented, and cannot speak from a position of secure knowledge that guarantees truth.

Aristotle’s thinking on poetry, like Plato’s, is focused on the issue of mimēsis, but Aristotle’s much more positive valuation of imitation and representation may be read as a conscious if indirect challenge to Plato. It is art’s imitative nature that ties it fruitfully to the world, allowing it to become a means for understanding human behaviour and indeed to offer a model of conduct, and it is this positive worldly relation that is stressed over a more abstract notion of truth. What both Plato and Aristotle do in effect is to shift the ground away from literature itself towards something that frames it and, in doing so, gives it significance: truth, moral philosophy in the form of examples of behaviour, or a form of activity that enhances social cohesion (such as communal attendance at theatrical festivals in Aristotle’s Poetics). Art and literature are important because they are philosophically useful, say these philosophers.

Thinking about literature from this functional perspective makes us rethink the question that we ask of literature, and the obvious question becomes no longer ‘What is literature?’ but rather ‘What is literature for?’ Aristotle is perhaps the first to have asked a version of this question, but it persists in relatively recent work such as Rita Felski’s The Uses of Literature (2007). This is another way of asking what literature does in or to the world, leading us on to a series of other questions, including ‘Who decides what literature is for?’ and ‘Who decides whether a particular work meets that expectation?’ From this also stems the range of questions that centre on whose world is represented and how, on whose experience is thought to be suitable for representation, on whose voices can be heard. This can lead us to another set of questions that are equally important, and appear regularly in the texts collected here: Who is literature for? Who has the right or means to produce it? Why write? Who reads, why, and how?

The stakes of literature and its definitions can appear to be very high once we begin to recognize its entanglement with other values within a culture. As Jacques Derrida puts it in an essay in On the Name (1995):

Literature is a modern invention, inscribed in conventions and institutions which, to hold on to just this trait, secure in principle its right to say everything. Literature thus ties its destiny to a certain non‐censure, to the space of democratic freedom (freedom of the press, freedom of speech, etc.). No democracy without literature, no literature without democracy [. . .] And each time that a literary work is censured, democracy is in danger, as everyone agrees. The possibility of literature, the legitimation that a society gives it, the allaying of suspicion or terror with regard to it, all that goes together – politically – with the unlimited right to ask any question, to suspect all dogmatism, to analyze every presupposition, even those of the ethics or the politics of responsibility.

Derrida’s sense of literature acknowledges the point made in the OED definition: what we have come to call literature is in fact a restricted sense of the word’s historical usage, and literature thought of in this way is a ‘modern invention’. In fact, the modernity of literature is part of what gives it its power, linked as it is to modes of expression and political organization that have themselves become characteristic of a certain (self‐)image of modernity: democratic freedom, its conventions, its institutions, and so on. One word might be worth pausing over in this invocation of what might otherwise seem a safely consensual characterization of literature: terror. To pursue rigorously why literature might inspire terror is beyond the scope of this introduction, but it indicates precisely that unsettling sense of literature’s potential to disturb that is tied to its survival.

***

For some readers, this will no doubt appear to be a decidedly odd time to be producing an anthology entitled What is Literature? Isn’t literature a thing of the past? Hasn’t it been superseded by film, TV, streaming or gaming? Doesn’t it demand a form of attention that none of us have time for any more? Hasn’t the image definitively displaced the word?

Certain commentators believe that we are approaching or may already be in a ‘post‐literary’ age. This belief is partly inspired by new technologies and the changing behaviours of the humans who interact with them. They will cite the impact of the internet, increasingly interactive and immersive gaming environments, attention spans more attuned to texting and tweets, the unstoppable flow of narrative from TV, movies, animation, social networking sites, and so on. The time of the printed word, and especially of the book, we are told, has run out. And just as the book has been declared obsolete, so too has literature. The functions of literature can all apparently be fulfilled by other media, or can be displaced by newer forms such as fan fiction, flash fiction, microfictions, collaboratively‐produced internet novels, screenplays, algorithms that can write the perfect narrative, and forms as yet unthought. Such views are often reinforced by a sense that literature was only ever one form of discourse among others, that what has come to be known as ‘creative writing’ is still, in the end, just writing, and that any form of art may – and should – be dissolved into a broader category of ‘culture’. The study of literature should become cultural studies, if it hasn’t already. In both arguments, literature as a distinct entity disappears, and the significance of the question ‘What is literature?’ disappears with it.

But, curiously, there is a more radical notion of literature’s disappearance that might allow us to retain a sense of literature as something demanding our curiosity. In a 1953 piece entitled ‘The Disappearance of Literature’, Blanchot concludes:

The essence of literature is precisely to evade any essential characterization, any affirmation which would stabilize or even realize it: it is never already there, it is always to be rediscovered or reinvented. It is never even certain that the words ‘literature’ or ‘art’ correspond to anything real, anything possible, or anything important. [. . .] Whoever affirms literature in itself affirms nothing. Whoever seeks it only seeks that which slips away; whoever finds it only finds what falls short of or, worse still, lies beyond literature.

This may help us to see why ‘What is literature?’ remains an open question. If Blanchot is right, it must remain open, since any answer to the question always turns out to have seized on something other than literature (which is perhaps what Plato and Aristotle encouraged). But for as long as it poses itself as a question – for as long as it evokes the desire for an answer, that is – literature has a future.

***

All anthologies are defined by what is not in them. Certainly the selection of texts offered here will not meet with universal approval, and there are many omissions that have been made with great reluctance and regret. Some of these are due to being unable to secure permission to reproduce material, or else it only being possible to include them at a cost that would have made this anthology impossible for anyone to afford.

I have favoured substantial and, where possible, complete selections rather than attempting to cover everything with brief extracts. Equally, I have privileged texts which explicitly engage with the nature of literature itself over texts which, however important, vital and interesting, are addressed largely to consideration of what literature represents or should represent, or which limit themselves to specific works or authors. This should not be taken as an indication that these questions are somehow less important than those raised by the pieces included here. The aim of this anthology is modest and more distinct than more general ‘theory’ readers, and so the desire to have a volume that was both focused and manageable has also influenced my selections.

One thing that being confronted with an anthology such as What is Literature? might lead you to think is that there is nothing left to say. The weight of the history of the question might seem disabling. The fact that no satisfactory answer to the title question seems to have been arrived at yet might suggest that it is a question that is no longer – and perhaps never was – worth asking. Alternatively, we can recognize that if we insist on these texts as themselves open to question, if we read them as starting points rather than endings, then working with and against them can give a context to habits of thought (our own and those of others). Unsettling these habits can allow for some of the strangeness and singularity of literary texts, their power to ‘veer’, in Nicholas Royle’s (2011) term, to become legible. Reading becomes riskier, and more pleasurable.

This recognition has to sit alongside a more troubling sense that because literature has been located, defined and associated with a particular moment in European culture, and that this is the same moment that also sees forms of imperialistic and nationalistic thought and action at their height (and depth), literature itself cannot be disentangled from that oppressive history. This braided inheritance of culture and barbarism is a history that needs to be thought through and acknowledged. One of the guiding principles in this anthology is that there is (at least) a counter‐history within the history of literature, and that any counter‐history is legible precisely in the repeated insistence on calling literature into question. To ask ‘What is literature?’ is to refuse to accept the given answers, to insist that literature might be otherwise, and that this ‘might be’ acts retrospectively. Literature’s identity cannot be presumed or assumed, it cannot be given a false stability except by acts of violent circumscription: there is a form of announcing a ‘love of literature’ that amounts to negating all those things that one might wish literature were not. Literature becomes what is left when everything that we want to call not‐literature has been removed. This negative definition of literature can become a weapon.

This is not sufficient. Anthropocentric and ethnocentric definitions of literature have always been fictions. Some fictions may be enabling; these are not. Literature has always been a matter of swerving, spacing, uncertain hesitation, boldly confessing a desire that marks a gap, a blindspot, an ellipsis or exclusion. And these points move, at times dizzyingly fast, at other moments almost imperceptibly. Yet they move. The fact that so many thinkers have been led to consider this question testifies to its ongoing urgency, to the desire for literature, to the desire to know what literature might (come to) mean. And the history of that desire should suggest something of literature’s potential power: its refusal to be reduced to such determinations, its flight from being enclosed in or reduced to that desire, to any single desire. This, I suspect, is literature’s power, and it is a potency that rests in what I am tempted to call its power of flight.