What makes something literature?
(And why do we read?)
Now, the dictionary definition for literature is simply a written work or a book published on a particular subject, so you could say that any book that has ever been written counts as literature.
But what distinguishes Dickens from a teen detective novel that you read on the bus the other day?
What makes an English teacher assuredly pick up a novel and dissect it with a class full of thirty teenagers?
Another definition for literature that I could find is a book or a work that had a profound and lasting impact on society and I think that is certainly true many of the great works or literature that we as a society agree upon.
Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Austin- we know them all and they can all be regarded as making a significant contribution to society, but it is complex than that.
There is a sense of the collective, I think, that makes a novel particularly profound. It has made a great impression on a large group of people or even society is a whole.
It tells us a great deal about the world, about people, about life in a certain time gone by but couldn’t that be argued of any modern book just as well? A large amount of people have enjoyed Harry Potter. Would that be considered literature? I think many would actually argue yes.
Nevertheless, whether it happens to be a classical novel or a magazine, we read to escape. We read to experience time periods that we cannot live in, lives that we cannot lead and people that we cannot be.
We read to learn. We read to understand people.
“The survival of popular works of literature is a testament to the endurance of human emotion over centuries. Expressing emotion is what we as a species need to survive, whether we are living in Victorian England or modern day.”
- Miss Barnett, teacher of English.
Who knows what will be considered great works of literature in the future? maybe they’re being written as we speak and maybe they’ll continue to be the ones we know and love.
I am certainly sure that Shakespeare will survive another few hundred years.
Maybe this is a sign to pick up a book. Better yet, pick up a pen.
Who knows, you could be the one to write that next great piece of literature the English students for years will pick apart and agonise over and wonder what it is that you meant by that simile on page 4 and how it links to the colour of the heroine’s dress on page 6.
Pick up a pen. Express your emotions. Continue the strings of human connection that span thousands of years in the form of words and chapters and books.
I’m certainly trying. And so should you.
