- After I read the chapter “What is literature and does it matter?” by Johnathan Culler, in my opinion, the most significant aspect of this section is that we should not look through non-literary works with colored eyes, and both literary and non-literary works need to be treated equally. To some extent, they all function well to express and convey authors’ feelings and thoughts. Alike Culler has discussed in the very beginning of the section, “For students and teachers of literature today, there is a whole range of critical projects, topics to read and write about- such as ‘images of women in the early 20th century’-where you can deal with both literary and non-literary works”. It indicates that nowadays, universities carry out the model that combines literary works with non-literary works to explain literature related problems. In the modern time, the primary work we keep in touch with is non-literary works since it makes more senses for us to understand compared with literary works. Moreover, Culler also addresses that to some extent, non-literary texts will be transformed into literary works. He took an sentence from a philosophy book, “A curious thing/about the ontological problem is its/simplicity.” Even though the essence of this sentence is not considered as literary work, it still attracts attentions due to an interest in the word, their relations to each other, etc. As far as I am concerned, it is vital to think of the definition of literature since it is everywhere in our lives. We can find it no matter where we go. Even a small piece of text will have chance to be considered as literature even though the essence of it is not.
2. When I went through the first pages of this chapter, the question which always stays with me is that “What distinguishing characteristics can distinguish works known as literary from those are non-literary?”
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