Tuesday, March 2, 2010
What is Literature?
I thought Szwed's writing was very eyeopening. Although I felt when I read it I already knew what he was talking about, this writing helped bring it into my conscious mind. On page 424 he poses the question of what literature is. Szwed says "No agreement. Distinctions between genres and categories such as functioning literature versus artistic literature are of little use." He goes on to ask if a subject such as sports could be artistic literature or functional literature or both. This part of the writing brings up a great point: there is no actual "literature" because there are so many different definitions and ideas of what it really is. To someone who does not attend college but works, their idea of literature will be completely different from the one who attends college. Does this make it wrong? I can't really answer that question. To me when I hear the word literature I think of reading novels or books. On the other hand, I just took a literature class and the only writings we read were articles. So to answer the question of what literature is, we would have to have pages upon pages of responses from everyone and anyone who has an idea of what it is.
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I agree that it is a hard thing to nail down exactly what literature is. It means many things to people who all have varying levels of experience with it. Being a relatively open ended word/definition, I think that ir can mean different things to different people and that that doesn't make it wrong.
ReplyDeleteI'm a little confused because the focus of Szwed's article is on literacy, not literature, though he does make the point you reference in relation to how we define what we read...Just because someone may not read literature, does not mean that they have a literacy problem because they may well read other things....I think that was his point.
ReplyDeleteI agree that I felt like I already knew what Szwed was talking aboutin "The Ethnography of Literacy" because his ideas were very clear and because one can see that his ideas are true to real life. I especially like the opening because it shows the relationship between literacy and being able to make a living. He says that "The capacity to read and write is casually associated with earning a living" (Szwed,421) which means that it is important to get an education in order to find success or to at least get a job.
ReplyDeleteAnother point I find interesting in the very beginning of the article is when Szwed talks about the decline in literacy. He says that "literacy as an ideal seems to be suffering a crisis" (Szwed, 421). By this I think he means that many people are not seeking to be literate. I find that this ties back to Mike Rose's "I just want to be Average" and Rodriguez's "The Achievement of Desire." The three articles have text that describes the idea that many people do not seek literacy.
I have to agree with you that we are unable to pinpoint exactly what literature is. I think a good example is just selecting a common genre and think about the different ways that it is portrayed. For example, non-fiction could be created through the use of memoirs, journalism, poetry, or even graphic novels. We can even say that a television show is a source of literature since the scripts that were written are texts and you have to read billboards or a brief block of text in order to understand the show.
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