I’ve always known the word “literature” to mean ” anything in relation to books, poems, and plays”. After reading and analyzing the short excerpt from Jonathan Culler, I can say the definition is a tad bit more complicated. Throughout the chapter, Culler goes on about how non-literary works can have components of a literary work, how different cultures can interpret literature in their own way, how certain texts can be considered literature while others cannot, etc. However, I found Culler’s comparison of literature to weeds to be the most important aspect of this chapter because it makes it easier for us to understand why this question needs to be asked, and more importantly, answered, in the first place.

What makes literature, literature? What makes a weed a weed? If I were to come up with my own example, I would say these ponderings are analogous to the question “what makes someone a cook?”. If I can scramble eggs and I know how to turn on an oven, does that make me a cook? Or do I have to know how to prepare an ossobuco and a gremolata, flute a mushroom, truss a chicken, and tourne a potato to be considered a cook? It’s when questions like these pop up that it becomes more apparent why finding the margins for the definition of “literature” is important, otherwise the guidelines would be too arbitrary to know when something is literary and when its not.

The question that I kept asking myself during the reading was if literature can ever truly have a solid definition. I know its a stretch – literature is an art form, and art is VERY open to interpretation – so how/when would an agreeable definition ever come to hold? Culler mentions this, that literature can have no solid definition because it is based on the observer’s own interpretations, analysis, questions, and reflections of the text. However, my question still stands

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.