Literature: An Introduction

Read: Understanding Literature (click here)

Outline of Main Issues

• What is literature?
• Medium: language
• Content: ideas
• Purpose: entertainment and persuasion
• Literature as a rhetoric engaging the human senses, desires, and emotions and conveying ideologies
and ideological messages

• Symbolism, indirectness, figurality of literary representation

• Layers of meaning: literal and symbolic
• Ideological meaning generally beyond the literal
• Literary creation: conscious and unconscious
• Dreams and stories
• Authors' awareness and unawareness of ideas in literature

• Sources of literature
• Direct: author's ideas, personal experiences, feelings, desires
• Indirect: ideologies; culture and society; historical circumstances; patronage; human aims,
aspirations, and desires
• Overdetermination: multiple causes and sources
• Complexity of authors, cultures, and historical situations
• Representation of multiple ideologies in literary texts
• Possibility of contradictory ideas within a single text

• The readers and audiences of literature

• Encounter of readers, texts, and authors
• Ideologies and historical circumstances of readers, audiences
• Influence of readers on the understanding of literature

• Interpretation: the art of explaining the meaning of literature, recovering the ideas embodied in the
symbols of literature
• Possibility of multiple meanings due to overdetermination
• Need for close, attentive reading of the text
• Need to understand author's life, historical context
• Need for awareness of readers' and interpreters' biases and ideological preferences
• Objective v.s. subjective interpretation
• Variable value of different interpretations