After having used the term for more than half of my life, it was not but until these past few days that I, along with my teacher and classmates, took the time to build and analyze a convincent definition of what literature is. This recquired our experience with it and a lot of brainstorming about it to finally reach our precious definition.
So, what is Literature? There are as many definitions for literature as opinions exist. We usually think about words like reading, writing, novels, books, stories, poetry, library, words, art, written language, feelings, thoughts... the list can be endless. The challenge now is putting all this together to build the definition. We can build our definition like this:
"Literature is the art of writing, reading or analyzing written thoughts, ideas or feelings that are put into paper with written words, or better said, language; and this forms a book with stories, poems, etc."
I think the definition itself is clear, and convincing. But I loved that, by erasing some words, we could tell everything, but with less words. So our final definition was: "Literature is the art of language."
That is it! With that definition we could tell all about it.
I still thought about it for a minute, as it was the first time I had truly analyzed the concept, and I didn't want to buy it without self-analyzing it.
But thinking about it, what did I think Literature was? I can honestly say that I related the term with thick books, long-plotted stories or a long-developed thesis statement. But I also related it to short stories, (like Poe's) or theatre plays (Shakespeare). And also poems. For me, Literature meant the text had to have a certain level of difficulty to read, and the ideas had to be very well organized and written in a way that would not resemble an ordinary person talking. With all this, I could not have had a very concrete definition, could I? And even though I like reading and I really enjoy writing, I could not know what literature was.
So back to the final definition, it finally convinced me. (And I learnt new things, like storytelling was part of Literature.) "Literature is the art of language".
- For Literature to be called an art, it has to have a certain level of quality and beauty.
- And it definitely tells us about language, not only written but talked.
So I cannot think of a better definition than that, gifting language with beauty, and making it not the common use of it.
I guess I wasn't that lost.
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