What is literature

 Questions.
1. What is the main motive of Formalists while studying a work of literature?
2. What is ‘Fine Writing ‘ according to Eagleton?
3. Is literature pragmatic or non-pragmatic, according to Eagleton?
4. Is value transitive or intransitive?
5. What is ideology and its impact?

Synopsis:

Terry Eagleton starts the chapter by saying that we need to know what literature is before
going ahead. She says that Literature is ‘imaginative’ and ‘fictional’. According to this, it tells
untrue fictionalized stories. If we believe in that then it becomes a categorized definition and
any piece of writing that is not imaginary and fictional, cannot qualify as literature. This is the
first question Eagleton raises in the start. Next she argues that if literature is ‘creative’ and
‘imaginative’ then what about history, philosophy and other natural sciences, are these not
imaginary?
Then she goes to Russian Formalists who say that Literature has nothing to do with
‘imagination’, actually it is the language that makes it literature. They say that content can be
noting but motivation. Some critics claims that Literature is connected to social realities but it is
not critic’s job to examine it. Formalists say that by using several ‘devices’ it creates
defamilarizing effects. This is the core characteristic of literary language that it is different from
ordinary language. Here Eagleton argues that Literature turns into be an estranged form from
ordinary language, at the same time it paradoxically enriches reader’s understanding and
makes us more experienced.
If literary language is a set of deviations from ordinary language then who will decide that what
is literary what is not. The scale to measure literariness is based on social discourses. Next she
says that if a language becomes estrange according to linguistic rules then who will decide that
it is still poetic. Formalists are upto define ‘literariness’ instead of Literature.
Literature is taken as self-referential sometimes and non-pragmatic. Here Eagleton claims that
any writing can be read as ‘non-pragmatically’ if it is the core reason to be literature. Some
critics say that Literature tells us about what we do and not about the fixed being of things.
Formalists say that any written work is measured with the scale ‘fine writing’ but Eagleton’s
stance is that it is upto the reader or the society to decide what is fine or bad, in which it is
produced.
Eagleton says that not any definition of Literature can be taken as perfect. Literature is
determined ‘subjectively’ but paradoxically this ‘subjectivity’ is also constructed by social
discourses and the ideology we follow.
 The Rise of English
Synopsis:

In this chapter Eagleton starts the history of English Literature from the 18 th century. In that
century, the definition of Literature was quite different and it had to do with ideology of a
particular social class.
After the bloody civil war, the aristocracy used literature as a tool to preserve their taste and
upper class culture by inculcating it into middle class by setting ideological institutions. The
definition of Literature did not advance unless the arrival of Romantic Period. Literature
became synonymous with imagination but paradoxically literature became literally untrue by
that time. With the emergence of romantic poetry, prose was started to be considered as dull
and uninspiring because it did not tell what did not exist but poetry did.
But when England started to emerge as an industrial nation, it turned every entity into
commodity on the open market and aired revolutions. Then poetry was used as a tool from the
side of ruling power to turn the resistance silent. After this, England turned into a society, these
writers and poets got no place and remained in their solitariness of their creative mind. This
alienation gave birth to the theory ‘Art for Art Sake’ and literature was considered purposeless.
At first religious ideologies was running like blood in the veins of society but when it failed,
English studies emerged as a new ideology. Apparently, English literature worked as a suitable
replacement. English became a subject used to cultivate the middle class and infuse them with
some values of the remaining aristocracy, thus English literature became the new way to pacify
the middle classes. Literature would convey timeless truths and distract the people from their
present commitments and conditions. It was also a way to experience things or events that
were not possible to experience in an individuals life. English as an academic subject was
nothing more than the poor man’s Classics. In addition, English became the new vehicle for
transferring the moral law, which was no longer taken from religion. Because English was not
exactly considered a ‘Real’ subject, it was often given to the ladies of higher learning
institutions. However, as the century drew on, English took on more of a masculine aspect. It
still took a while for the study of English to be taken seriously, but finally English literature came
into power, mostly because of wartime nationalism. The new subject was created by the
offspring of the bourgeoisie, rather than those who currently held social power.
Now the study of English was in trend, and people may have wondered how it had ever been
otherwise. Deep and intense questions became subject to the most intense scrutiny.
Literature was also perhaps the only place where creative language was allowed to flourish.
Moreover, those were studying felt that they were a part of a larger movement that was
moving civilization back to the way it should have been, as in the seventeenth century.
“Scrutiny” did not seek to change society in any way, rather their goal was to withstand it.
Teaching children about the corrupt culture they lived in was very important, instead of making
them memorize pointless passages of literature. Eagleton said that the Scrutiny project was
“hair-raisingly radical and really rather absurd.” In the end, Scrutiny was simply a project of
the elitists. The ‘organic’ society needed by Scrutiny could not be gained, nothing more than a
lofty desire to reclaim the golden days of the past. Some types of English were considered more
English than others, which ironically reminds one of the types of arguments given by the upper
class before. When T.S. Eliot came to England, he upgraded the status of the poets and
dramatists while toppling Milton and the Romantics. Literature was considered to more
attached to tradition, Eliot thought that middle-class liberalism had failed in light of the war,
and a poet must develop a new type of sensory language in poetry that would speak to a
person’s senses rather than their intellect
Practical criticism meant a method that was unafraid to take a text apart, but also presumed
that you could judge literary greatness by focusing on pieces of poetry or prose isolated from
their cultural contexts. Close reading also mean detailed analytic interpretation, but also
seemed to imply that former methods of criticism read only three words per line. Also assumed
that any literary work could be understood in isolation from its context. An advocate of modern
science, Richards felt that, even though he himself felts questions such as ‘what?’ or ‘why?’
were not valid, if pseudo-answers were not given to such pseudo-questions, society would fall
apart. The role of poetry is to supply such answers.
New Criticism was deeply marked by the doctrines that organizing lawless lower human
impulses more effectively will ensure the survival of the higher finer ones (not too dissimilar
from the old Victorian belief that organizing the lower classes will ensure the survival of the
upper ones). New Criticism was not too different from Scrutiny, it reinvented in literature what
it could not find in reality. They came up with something called the Great Man theory of
literature, which says that even if the author’s intentions in writing were recovered, they were
of no relevance to the interpretation of his or her text. At the same time, neither could the
emotional responses of readers be confused with the poem’s true meaning. Ultimately,
reading poetry in the New Critical way meant committing yourself to nothing, specifically a
dismissal of anything.