In my opinion, the most interesting and useful angle of defining “literature” is its fictionality. In this chapter, when explaining “what is  literature”, Culler took the opening sentence of a book as an example, claiming that the “curious thing” of the poem is “not a physical object but something like a relation or aspect which doesn’t seem to exist in the same way that a stone or a house does.“（25） Since literature is not describing specific things or events, it leaves rooms for people to imagine, think deeply and relate the content with their own understandings. There is no certain answer to interpret literature works. As Culler claimed, ” the fictionality of literature separates language from other contexts in which it might be used and leaves the work’s relation to the world open to interpretation.”(33) For literature works, everyone has their own interpretations. In addition, people’s interpretation of literature works may also change over time, which i believe is one of the reasons why great literature works have been passed down to generations.

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