Repository | Book | Chapter

Literature already involves a relation to language; one complicated immediately by literature already being a form of language. Literature is language at work. Once preliminary moves of this nature are conceded then the immediate questions that follow will almost inevitably concern the specific form of language that can be described as literary. Again, to the extent that it becomes possible to detect the consistent use of literary language, what this opens up is the possible identification of literary language with the essence of literature itself. From within this framework, answers to the question "what is literature?' would involve attempts to define or at least locate literature's essential quality. The difficulty with such an argument is not that it resists addressing literature and thus would refuse the position that held to literature's own particularity — literature as opposed to science, for example — but that it does so in terms of essences. This commitment to the essential is more than the simple use of the language of essences. Rather, the commitment is to the very idealism that sustains such a language. And yet, what would literature be if literature were not to have an essential quality? Responding to this question will allow for the development of a materialist account of literature; an account positioned beyond, and positioning literature beyond, the hold of idealism.

DOI: 10.1057/9780230598621_13

Full citation: