what is literature pdf


A literature review summarizes and synthesizes the existing scholarly research on a particular topic. We want important writing (bearing in mind that not every successful poem, play, or story need be utterly serious) to explore the human condition, and we want our writers to function, as T. S. Eliot said of the metaphysical poets, as “curious explorers of the soul.” Such exploration may be mediated by personal as well as historical forces, but the work will always reveal human nature to be more obdurate than are the institutions that seek to channel it. Canon formation continued to rely on a credible, if not monolithic, consensus among informed readers. Literature reviews are a form of academic writing commonly used in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. In the late Seventies, the anticanonites began taking over the universities, and the English-department syllabus, the canon by another name, was dismantled. — a record of one human being’s sojourn on earth, proffered in verse or prose that artfully weaves together knowledge of the past with a heightened awareness of the present in ever new verbal configurations. Essentially, the postmodernists were against — well, essentialism. Even critics who wrote for general-interest magazines appeared fed up with the idea that some books were better for you than others. LINGUISTICS. Use the following strategies as a guide as you embark on the writing process.

The canon may be gone, but the idea of the canon persists.4 Penguin Books is now issuing a series of “modern classics,” which the publisher has decided are classics in the making. Because a canon of vastly superior ancient writers — Homer, Virgil, Cicero — already existed, a modern canon had been slow to develop. In time, the canon, formerly the province of reviews and magazines, was annexed by institutions of higher learning, which cultivated eminent professors of English and comparative literature and later recruited famous poets and writers to act as gatekeepers. Forgot your password? At the risk of waxing metaphysical, one might argue that literature, like any artifact, has both a Platonic form and an Aristotelian concreteness. endstream endobj 588 0 obj <. A piece of writing was “literary” only if enough learned readers spoke well of it; but as Thomas Rymer observed in 1674, “till of late years England was as free from Criticks, as it is from Wolves.”. Fiedler maintained that he had been brainwashed by highbrow criticism to the detriment of his own natural enjoyment of pure storytelling.
The Anglo-Saxon age comprises about 600 years.Beowoulf is one of the most important works of that age. “Literary” does not refer to “what is expressed, what is invented, in whatever form,” and literature does not encompass every book that comes down the pike, however smart or well-made. There’s a new definition of literature in town. — Adler and Hutchins. Publication date 1949 Topics LANGUAGE. Books continue to matter, of course, but not in the way that earlier generations took for granted. It is an epic poem which throws light on a young warrior in …

The tree he had helped cultivate now bent dangerously under the weight of its own foliage. As such, the canon was tied to the advance of literacy, the surging book trade, the growing appeal of novels, the spread of coffee shops and clubs, the rise of reviews and magazines, the creation of private circulating libraries, the popularity of serialization and three-decker novels, and, finally, the eventual takeover of literature by institutions of higher learning. To mess with the canon was to mess with civilization itself. As the tree aged, other limbs formed capable of sustaining Elizabethan drama, nineteenth-century novels, essays, short stories, and lyric poems. Simply because anthologies or serialization influenced the composition of poems and novels didn’t mean that writers tossed aesthetic considerations aside. and "Why Write?"

Literature reviews do more than list the sources you’ve consulted: they summarize and critically evaluate those sources. one cannot get away from one’s temperament any more than one can jump away from one’s shadow, but one can discount the emphasis which it produces. By 1781, Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets had confirmed the canon’s constituents — fifty-two of them — but also fine-tuned standards of literary merit so that the common reader, “uncorrupted with literary prejudice,” would know what to look for. Enter your new information and click on Save My Changes. (French: Qu'est-ce que la littérature? Although writers may be good or bad, literature itself is always good, if not necessarily perfect. The word canon, from the Greek, originally meant “measuring stick” or “rule” and was used by early Christian theologians to differentiate the genuine, or canonical, books of the Bible from the apocryphal ones. . Although the snubbing of temperament is not easily accomplished, we can try. One can have flawed literature but not bad literature; one can have something “like literature” or even “literature on a humble but not ignoble level,” as Edmund Wilson characterized the Sherlock Holmes stories, but one can’t have dumb or mediocre literature. Kellett concluded his short but far-ranging survey by noting that “almost all critical judgment . But if there is even a remote chance of its happening, the first thing we have to do is acknowledge our own deep-seated preferences. Indelible truths, as Auden might say, stare from every human face, and they are not at the whim of regime change.
A bibliography is a list of resources consulted when researching a particular topic. Certain novels, despite “their executive ineptitude and imprecision of language,” moved him, and he wasn’t going to deny it. 587 0 obj <> endobj It wasn’t until John Erskine of Columbia and Robert Maynard Hutchins of the University of Chicago lobbied, in the 1920s, for a list of indispensable works in literature and philosophy that the canon became equated with a syllabus. More than anyone else, however, it was Erskine’s student Mortimer J. Adler who popularized the idea of the Great Books. It enables you to position your research in the broader academic community, synthesise existing ideas and arguments without adding your own, and identify any gaps in the literature which your research is attempting to address.

Writers may not be able to “escape from contingency,” as the new historicists used to say, but those sensitive to their prisons can transform the walls that confine them — a transformation that requires an awareness of the great poets and novelists who preceded them. The canon anointed the worthy and, by implication, the unworthy, functioning as a set of commandments that saved people the trouble of deciding what to read. People communicated the poems and literary works orally during the period under consideration. Each reviewer must decide which specific studies to include or exclude from a review and why. . The rest isn’t silence, but it isn’t literature either. . One way around this dilemma was to create new ancients closer to one’s own time, which is precisely what John Dryden did in 1700, when he translated Chaucer into Modern English. endstream endobj startxref to be the Property of any Person.” It was at this point, Ross claims, that “the canon became a set of commodities to be consumed. And because poets wanted to see their work anthologized, they began writing shorter poems to increase their chances for inclusion. First, literature reviews are not bibliographies.

Keywords: literature review; meta-analysis; synthesis; teacher qualifications . Your literature review is much more than a routine assignment: it's a contribution to the future of your field. Need to create a login? When is it time to abandon a place to climate change? 0 Get help here. %PDF-1.5 %���� While books were conceived in private, they reflected the ideological makeup of their host culture; and the criticism that gave them legitimacy served only to justify the prevailing social order. . What Is Literature by Sartre,Jean Paul. As Barbara Benedict explains in Making the Modern Reader, the first anthologies were pieced together less out of aesthetic conviction than out of the desire of printers and booksellers to promote books whose copyrights they held. In effect, the canon formalized modern literature as a select body of imaginative writings that could stand up to the Greek and Latin texts. LITERATURE, Literature, Literature Publisher Philosophical Library. ), also published as Literature and Existentialism, ) is an essay by French philosopher and novelist Jean-Paul Sartre, published by Gallimard in 1948. Timeless stories from our 170-year archive handpicked to speak to the news of the day. Apparently, “literary means not only what is written but what is voiced, what is expressed, what is invented, in whatever form” — in which case maps, sermons, comic strips, cartoons, speeches, photographs, movies, war memorials, and music all huddle beneath the literary umbrella. By the early 1800s, according to Thomas Bonnell, author of That Most Disreputable Trade, uniform sets of poetry or the “complete works” of writers were standard publishing fare; and because the books looked and felt so good — The Aldine Edition of the British Poets (1830–52) was bound in morocco and marbled boards with gilt on the front covers and spines — each decorative volume seemed to shout “Literature.”?2 But it would be small-minded, as well as excessive, to claim that commerce alone drove the literary enterprise. Apparently, “literary means not only what is written but what is voiced, what is expressed, what is invented, in whatever form” — in which case maps, sermons, comic strips, cartoons, speeches, photographs, movies, war memorials, and music all huddle beneath the literary umbrella. Alongside essays on Twain, Fitzgerald, Frost, and Henry James, there are pieces about Jackson Pollock, Chuck Berry, the telephone, the Winchester rifle, and Linda Lovelace. Eighty-five years ago, in The Whirligig of Taste, the British writer E. E. Kellett disabused absolutists of the notion that books are read the same way by successive generations. SINGLE PAGE PROCESSED TIFF ZIP download. The canon, they argued, represented the best that had been thought and said, and its contents were an expression of the human condition: the joy of love, the sorrow of death, the pain of duty, the horror of war, and the recognition of self and soul. Although the canon could groan and shift in its place, as late as 1970 there was probably little disagreement as to what constituted literature.3 Despite the Nobel Prize’s being awarded to some unlikely recipients, as well as to Bertrand Russell, literature generally meant the best literature; and the canon, despite the complicity of institutions and the interests of those involved in the promotion of books, was essentially an aesthetic organism tended by literary and academic gardeners. Leslie Fiedler, for one, owned up to his susceptibility to not-so-great novels in What Was Literature? More than the distinctive knit of his verse or prose, a writer is what he (or she) chooses to write about, and the canon is the meeting place where strong writers, in Harold Bloom’s agonistic scenario, strive to outmuscle their precursors in order to express their own individuality. Literature with a capital L was nothing more than a bossy construct, and the canon, instead of being genuine and beneficial, was unreal and oppressive.

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