Introduction to Literature

Lessons

Senior 4 · Literature in English

Introduction to Literature

5 lessons

Lesson 1 of 5

What Literature Is, What It Does, and How It Differs from the Other Arts

25 min

Here are two pieces of writing about the same thing. The first is the kind of sentence a radio weather bulletin might read (it was written for this lesson). The second is a poem printed in London in 1872 in Sing-Song, a book of rhymes for children by Christina Rossetti.

Light to moderate winds of 10 to 15 kilometres per hour are expected over the Eastern Province this afternoon.
Weather bulletin (illustrative)

Who has seen the wind?
Neither I nor you:
But when the leaves hang trembling
The wind is passing thro’.
Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I:
But when the trees bow down their heads
The wind is passing by.
Christina Rossetti, Sing-Song (1872)

The bulletin tells you more facts: a speed, a place, a time. You will use it this afternoon and forget it tonight. The poem tells you no facts at all, and it has been read aloud to children and studied by adults for over 150 years. Something in the second text makes it worth keeping. That "something" is what this unit is about.

Definition

literature: spoken or written works in which language is used imaginatively and with care, to give pleasure, express experience and shape how people think and feel. Example: a novel, a play, a poem, a folktale told at night.
literary text: a text written or performed mainly for its imaginative and artistic value. non-literary (functional) text: a text written mainly to inform or to get a job done. Example: a poem is literary; a receipt, a timetable or a weather bulletin is functional.
oral literature: literature that is composed, performed and passed on by word of mouth. written literature: literature fixed in writing or print.
genre: a kind or category of literature with shared features. The three main written genres are prose, poetry and drama.
aesthetic: to do with beauty and artistic pleasure. The aesthetic function of a poem is the pleasure its sound and images give.

What makes a text literary?

Put the two texts side by side and the differences become the features of literature.

Question	Weather bulletin	"Who has seen the wind?"
Why was it written?	To inform: one practical purpose	To delight and to make the reader think and feel
How is language used?	Plainly; every word has one exact meaning	With care for sound (rhyme "you / thro’", "I / by"), repetition and images
How many meanings?	One. Two readers will understand the same thing	Several. Readers may disagree, and that is part of the pleasure
Imagination	None needed	Trees "bow down their heads" like people: the reader pictures it
How long is it useful?	One afternoon	As long as people wonder about things they cannot see

Reading the poem closely. The question "Who has seen the wind?" is answered at once: nobody. Yet the poem proves the wind is real by its effects: trembling leaves, bowing trees. The second stanza turns "I nor you" round to "you nor I", a small change that makes the pattern feel like a game. Many readers take the poem further: we cannot see love, faith, grief or an idea either, but we know them by what they do. The poem does not say this. It leaves the space for the reader to fill, and that space is one mark of a literary text.

So literature is not defined by being written (a folktale is literature), nor by being invented (a memoir is literature), nor by being difficult (a nursery rhyme can be literature). It is defined by an imaginative, artistic use of language that rewards more than one reading.

What literature does: its functions

Two old answers still frame the question. The Roman poet Horace, in his Art of Poetry (about 19 BCE), said that the writer who wins every vote is the one who "mixes the useful with the sweet" (miscuit utile dulci). In England, Sir Philip Sidney's The Defence of Poesy (published 1595) called poetry "a speaking picture, with this end, to teach and delight". Most of the functions below are a version of teaching or delighting.

Function	What it means	Example
To entertain (aesthetic function)	Gives pleasure through story, suspense, humour, rhythm and beautiful language	A trickster tale of Bakame the hare told on a dark evening
To educate and teach morals	Passes on values and warns against bad behaviour, usually without a lecture	A fable that ends with a moral; a proverb quoted to a careless child
To preserve culture and history	Keeps a people's memory, language, customs and beliefs	Ibisigo, the dynastic poems of the Rwandan royal court, kept the memory of the kings' reigns
To criticise society and push for change	Exposes injustice and makes readers feel it	Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) turned many American readers against slavery
To express feeling and identity	Lets a writer, and a community, say who they are	A love song, a lament, a poem about one's homeland
To build empathy	Lets readers live, for a while, inside another person's life	A novel told by a refugee child, read by someone who has never left home
To develop language	Enriches vocabulary and shows what a language can do	Learning new words and expressions from a novel
To heal and remember	Helps people name pain, mourn and remember together	Survivors' testimonies written after the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, which keep memory alive

One text often does several jobs at once. A Bakame tale entertains children, teaches them that cleverness beats size and preserves Kinyarwanda expressions, all in ten minutes.

The family of literature

The diagram is a map of this unit and of the course. Lessons 3 and 4 explore the left branch, lesson 5 the right.

Literature among the arts

Literature belongs to a larger family: the arts. Every art is a human creation made with skill, meant to be experienced for its own sake and open to interpretation. What separates them is the medium, the material the artist works in.

Art	Medium	Received through	Unfolds in	Rwandan example
Literature	Words, spoken or written	Hearing or reading	Time: one word after another	An umugani told in the evening; a novel
Music	Organised sound: pitch, rhythm, melody	Hearing	Time	A song sung to the inanga (zither)
Painting and design	Line, shape and colour on a surface	Sight	Space: seen all at once	Imigongo geometric panels
Sculpture and craft	Solid material: wood, clay, sisal	Sight and touch	Space, in three dimensions	Agaseke woven baskets
Dance	Movement of the body	Sight, usually with music	Time and space	The intore dance
Theatre and film	Actors, images, sound and words together	Sight and hearing	Time	A play at a school drama festival

In 1766 the German critic Gotthold Lessing argued, in Laocoön, that painting is an art of space (it shows one frozen moment, all at once) while poetry is an art of time (it moves through events in order). The distinction explains what each art does best:

Literature can enter a mind. A sentence can say what a character secretly fears; a painting can only show a face.
Literature moves freely through time. It can jump back twenty years, or tell what will happen tomorrow.
Literature can state ideas, such as justice or forgiveness, directly in words.
But literature cannot show a colour or play a sound. It must make the reader imagine them. Rossetti never shows us a tree; we build it in our heads. In that sense the reader finishes every literary work.

Literature also shares a great deal with its neighbours. Poetry is close to music (rhythm, rhyme, songs), drama is close to dance and theatre (performance), and descriptive writing is close to painting, which is why Sidney could call poetry "a speaking picture".

Worked example: is it literature?

Task: Decide whether each text is literary or functional, and give two reasons.

"Your payment of 5,000 Frw to Uwase has been received. New balance: 12,350 Frw." (a mobile-money message, illustrative)
Functional. (1) Its only purpose is to inform; (2) every word has one exact meaning and no reader needs imagination to understand it. Nobody will read it again for pleasure.
Akabando k'iminsi gacibwa kare. ("The walking stick for your later days is cut early.")
Literary: a proverb of Rwandan oral literature. (1) It speaks in an image, not a plain statement: the stick stands for whatever will support you in old age (savings, education, friendships); (2) it has been passed on by memory for generations and is used to teach. Its meaning grows as the listener applies it to his or her own life.
"Drink it cold, feel bold!" (an advertising slogan, illustrative)
Mostly functional, though it borrows literary tools. It rhymes and has rhythm, but its purpose is to sell a product, it has one intended meaning, and it will vanish with the campaign. Literary devices alone do not make a text literature: purpose, depth of meaning and lasting value count too.

Tip

A definition in three moves. When an exam asks "What is literature?", give (1) a one-sentence definition, (2) two features that separate it from functional writing, and (3) a short example. "Literature is the imaginative, artistic use of language in spoken or written works. Unlike functional writing, it uses images and sound for effect and is open to more than one interpretation; Rossetti's 'Who has seen the wind?' is an example."

Warning

Literature is not "anything written". A receipt or a timetable is writing but not literature.
Literature is not only books. A folktale or proverb that has never been written down is literature too.
Fiction is not "lies". A story can be invented and still tell the truth about people.
When you name a function, don't stop at "it entertains". Say how, and show it in the words of the text.

"'What is Literature?': A Literary Guide for English Students and Teachers", from the Oregon State University School of Writing, Literature and Film. As you watch, note how the speaker separates literature from other kinds of writing, and compare her answer with the table "What makes a text literary?" above.

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Practice

Define literature in one sentence, and name its two broad divisions.
Give three differences between the weather bulletin and "Who has seen the wind?".
Explain what Sidney meant by "to teach and delight", using a story or song you know as an example.
Name the medium of (a) literature, (b) music, (c) imigongo art.
Using Lessing's idea of time and space, explain why a novel can show a character's past more easily than a painting can.
A school poster says "Keep Calm and Read On". Is it literature? Give two reasons.
"Literature is a luxury; a poor country needs engineers, not poets." Write a paragraph of about 120 words that answers this view, using at least two functions of literature.

Show answersHide answers

Literature is the imaginative, artistic use of language in spoken or written works that give pleasure and express human experience. Its two broad divisions are oral literature and written literature.
Any three: the bulletin informs while the poem delights and makes the reader think; the bulletin has one meaning while the poem can be read several ways; the poem uses rhyme, repetition and personification while the bulletin uses plain words; the bulletin is useful for an afternoon while the poem lasts.
Literature should give pleasure and also teach something. Example: a Bakame tale makes children laugh (delight) and shows that cleverness can beat strength (teach).
(a) words, spoken or written; (b) organised sound; (c) line, shape and colour on a surface (often in relief).
A painting is an art of space: it shows one moment at a glance. A novel is an art of time: its sentences follow one another, so it can move back twenty years in a flashback, or tell us a memory in a character's own words.
Mostly no. It is a slogan with one practical purpose (to encourage reading) and a borrowed pattern. It uses little imagery, has one meaning and is not valued for its own sake. (A student who argues that it is a tiny literary play on a famous phrase should still give reasons.)
A strong answer accepts that engineers matter, then shows that literature also does necessary work: it preserves a people's history and language, builds empathy between citizens, criticises injustice and helps a community remember and heal (for example, testimonies after the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi). It may add that engineers too read, and that stories shape the values a country builds with.

Quick check

Which feature most clearly makes Rossetti's poem literary and the weather bulletin functional?

Key points

Literature is the imaginative, artistic use of language, spoken (oral) or written. What marks it is care for language, imagery and more than one meaning, not simply being written down.
Its functions can be summed up as "to teach and delight": entertaining, teaching values, preserving culture, criticising society, expressing identity, building empathy and helping people remember.
Literature's medium is words. It unfolds in time, can enter minds and move through time, but must make the reader imagine what painting shows and music plays.

Sources and credits

"Who has seen the wind?" from Christina Rossetti, Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (1872), Project Gutenberg: public domain.
Quotation from Sir Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poesie and Poems, Project Gutenberg: public domain. Horace's Art of Poetry (about 19 BCE): public domain.
Image: Imigongo art, Emile Maurice Dusengumukiza, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Video: "What is Literature?": A Literary Guide for English Students and Teachers, OSU School of Writing, Literature and Film, embedded from YouTube.
The weather bulletin, the worked example's message and slogan, the tables, the diagram, notes and practice were written by Ganzaa.
This lesson adapts CC BY-SA material and is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.

1What makes a text literary?

2What literature does: its functions

3The family of literature

4Literature among the arts

What makes a text literary?

What literature does: its functions

The family of literature

Literature among the arts