New Literary History, 2007, 37: 229–237

Commentary: What Is Literature Now?

Jonathan Culler

The question “What is literature?” is not, like “What is hematite?” asked out of ignorance. It is a question of interest only to those who already have a sense of the extension of the concept and

who want, for whatever reason, to think about the defining or differen-tial qualities of the phenomena to which, as they know perfectly well, the term is generally applied. In attempting to respond, one can talk about what literature does, how it functions in this or that society or institutional context, or one can inquire whether there are properties that literary works share and features that distinguish literature from other cultural objects or activities. The first approach can generate much interesting discussion of the role of literature in establishing or contesting a national culture, in giving concrete, vivid expression to moral, ethical, and developmental scenarios, in teaching disinterested appreciation, in establishing bourgeois hegemony, and so on. Literature has been given diametrically opposed functions—a set of stories that seduce readers into accepting the hierarchical structures of society, and a practice where ideology is challenged or subverted—but unless the functioning of literature is described in rather vacuous terms, there is not likely to be a single function that all literary works perform, and as soon as the functions or effects are described with enough specificity to become pertinent and interesting, one finds that each of these functions (constituting a nation, contesting ideology) can also be performed by nonliterary discourses.

Adopting the second approach and trying to identify the defining features of works deemed literary leads to discussion of important charac-teristics of literary works, such as their fictionality, their noninstrumental use of language, their high degree of organization that extends to levels and to linguistic features usually regarded as transparent, their dependent yet transformative relation to other texts regarded as literary; but, again, each of these qualities is likely also to be shared with works not usually regarded as literature. One of the major lessons of theory has been that literariness is not confined to literature but can be studied in historical narratives, philosophical texts, and rhetorical and cultural practices of very different sorts. Moreover, for many works, it does not seem to be

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objective properties that make them literature but rather the fact that they are read in certain ways, placed in the cultural framework of literature, subject to particular sorts of attention. And once one begins to think of the cultural or interpretive frame as crucial to literature and widens the historical scope of one’s inquiry beyond a particular society or historical period, it is hard not to reach the deeply unsatisfying conclusion that literature is whatever is treated as literature by a given society. Just as weeds are not defined by objective properties but by a culturally and historically variable framework—weeds are plants that are not wanted in the lawn or garden—so literature may be the name of a variable cultural function rather than a class defined by distinctive properties of language. Though at one level this may be true, it is not at all what one wants as an answer to the question, “What is literature?”

In his 1973 article for New Literary History, “The Notion of Literature,” Tzvetan Todorov speaks of functional and structural definitions of lit-erature and, running through some of the possibilities, concludes that “whether or not the functional notion of literature is legitimate, the structural notion definitely is not.”1 There are no defining features that distinguish literature from other discourses, and theorists’ failure to identify the “specific difference” (12) that characterizes literature leads him to wonder, in conclusion, whether it could be “that literature does not exist” (12).

For any reader of Wittgenstein, such a conclusion seems both naïve and premature. Garry Hagberg, pursuing the Wittgensteinian notion of family resemblance, overlapping features that make a class recognizable, even though there is no one feature shared by all members of the class, takes up the challenge. Refusing to accept Todorov’s implied conclu-sion, that literature does not exist if there are no essential features that distinguish works of literature from other works, Hagberg asks what are “some of the features of the family of practices and engagements that we call literature?” (165) Drawing on C. S. Peirce, Josiah Royce, and William James, he focuses on literature as instrument of a relational aesthetic experience for the construction of selfhood. Within the world of literary experience we accomplish acts of comparison that are both interpretive and self-interpretive, helping us comparatively to constitute ourselves as we imaginatively see or do not see ourselves in the actions and reflections of literary characters and discursive positions. “Whatever else literature may be,” he concludes, “it is one significant determinant of the contents of selfhood” (178).

Todorov would not disagree—indeed, his later essay, “What Is Literature For?” takes just such a functionalist line, arguing for literary education that would treat literature as writing that “allows us to better understand the human condition and transforms each of its readers inwardly” (30).

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But Todorov recognizes that this is not at all an account of what defines or distinguishes literature, for a wide range of other texts can work in the same way, with similar illuminating and transformative effects. And it is not clear, I would add, that the construction of self through identifying or not identifying with characters or a discursive position is how poetry primarily works, for example.

In fact, when people take up the question “what is literature?” it is usually in order to propound an answer that will recommend one critical approach to literature rather than another. The question functions above all to invite responses that argue for particular ways of approaching or analyzing literature by positing a nature of literature that requires this particular approach. If literature is mimesis, then attention should focus on the human actions represented and the value added by fictional rep-resentation, and critics who proceed otherwise are grievously misled. If literature is the foregrounding of language, then criticism should focus on the linguistic patterning and its significance.

The addition of “now” to the question—“What is literature now?”—though it might have radically transformed the question, can work instead to encourage a response designed to critique current critical approaches to and understandings of literature. Thus, Charles Altieri’s account of the sensuous dimension of literary experience aims to counter various current materialist approaches to literature that neglect the aesthetic appeal of the literary object. His is a generous text, conceding much to the intentions and ambitions of materialist approaches he critiques, particularly Bill Brown’s attempt to realize in criticism William Carlos Williams’s slogan, “no ideas but in things,” while arguing that these ap-proaches do not provide the most accurate account of how literature does cultural work. Focus on the sensuousness of aesthetic experience, and particularly on the role of imagination in constructing sensuous-ness, is necessary to explain how literature can build intense imaginative engagements of the sort required to produce the effects on readers that justify the value we have attributed to literature.

Terry Cochran also answers the question “What is literature?” so as to champion an approach to literary works at odds with current institution-alized literary study. “Rather than a subcategory of cultural production, literature is a process of invention that involves the human mind in its most basic yearnings and capacities to represent” (127). If the literary canon implicitly depends on the religious model of a set of sacred texts open to endless explication, the secular movement of modern criticism has made this model “an empty, conceptual hull” (128), and left litera-ture but one domain of knowledge among others. As institutionalized, literature “has been stripped of its powers to evoke the unknown, the unknowable, the unforeseen, or even the unthinkable” (129). Rightly

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understood, literature is the storehouse and producer of unpredictable knowledge.

Cochran’s antagonist is not just the academy but the general repre-sentation of literature as a historical phenomenon, and hence as an object of knowledge rather than stimulus to invention. I wish that this lively and attractive essay had included some examples of the literary evocation of the unknown, beyond Freud’s use of “literature as a sound-ing board” (140). If it is the nature of literature to evoke the unknown or generate unpredictable knowledge, examples should not be hard to come by. But perhaps no account in an academic journal of literature as stimulus to unpredictable knowledge can represent that knowledge without undermining its own claims to liberate literature from the grip of academic criticism.

Jan Swearingen also offers an account of the nature of literature designed to resist the sway of current critical approaches, which she sees as distancing, treating literature as culture rather than a rhetorical transaction with the reader. “Literature is being reconfigured as a looking glass through which we can see, if only darkly, a bit of culture” (149). A better understanding of the rhetorical nature of literature might help to remedy the neglect of the reader and of reading. For Todorov, how-ever, in “What is Literature For?” rhetoric and poetics are the enemy. As a major player in the French structuralism of the 1960s and 1970s, which developed and championed a poetics to counter the teaching of literature as historical or biographical document then prevalent in the French educational system, Todorov bewails what he sees as the triumph of an academicized structuralism in French secondary education (“the structuralists now dominate the schools” [22]), where students study literature to learn techniques of literary analysis instead of acquainting themselves with everything literature has to tell us about being human. In his indictment of the academic treatment of literature in French secondary schools, Todorov, who has not taught in the lycée nor much in the university, refers to official statements about the curriculum, but one may wonder whether, while the powers that be do indeed specify that students should learn about genres, registers, and critical techniques, the students might actually also talk about themes and characters, as students are inclined to do. Todorov bemoans the failure to use literature to talk about the moral issues of life, but in American secondary education, where this approach has been avidly embraced, the results are scarcely encouraging. Literature is widely used in the schools as the vehicle of moral and social education, as the representation of the experiences of minority groups, for instance, and students come to university with pre-cious little knowledge of literary genres, forms, or critical techniques—and not necessarily a greater enthusiasm for literature than French students.

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Todorov’s complaint may well make American academics envious—that French students should come to university so well versed in the elements of literature and the techniques of literary criticism.

Todorov cites deconstruction as partly responsible for what he calls “literature reduced to the absurd” (17). Deconstruction, he tells us, declares “in advance, since this is their dogma, that the work is fatally incoherent, that it succeeds in affirming nothing” (21). And in American universities it has succeeded in infecting disciplines such as history, law, and even the natural sciences, which “have become in their turn closed and self-sufficient objects” (21). As is typical in such critiques, Todorov cites no examples. Perhaps it was too difficult to find a deconstructive reading that does not celebrate the insightfulness of the text in its self-division or self-reflexivity. It might be pertinent to note that Jacques Derrida’s own writings on literary works, whether by Kafka, Celan, Joyce, or Blanchot, link literature with a host of political, ethical, and philosophical issues—the very opposite of treating literature as a closed and self-sufficient version of the absurd. Though Todorov complains that deconstructive readings do not deliver a truth, such as “the inno-cent pleasure of living for the sake of living” (30) that he celebrates in George Sand, later in the essay he himself sees the value of literature in today’s mediatic culture as a questioning one: “The books that the young person takes hold of could help her set aside the ‘obvious truths’ and free her mind” (26–27) “Literature has a special role to play here: unlike religious, moral or political discourses, it does not formulate a system of precepts” (27). Paul de Man championed what he was inclined to call rhetorical reading as precisely such an attention to what in the literary work resists the moral or political precepts that critics have used literature to convey.

Laurent Dubreuil, in what is the most challenging essay of the col-lection, takes up the question “What is literature?” by focusing on the special temporality of literature—the ways literature inhabits the now. The impossibility of a definition of literature can be seen as one of its characteristics, as it always comes after, taking up, citing, and transform-ing other discourses—“literature not only speaks of them, but it speaks them”(48)—questioning every mode of knowledge: “literature interferes with the logic of all –logy” (49). The literary now, Dubreuil emphasizes, “is diffracted in different presents: tenses and times of writing, steps in reading, constitution of comment and vital commitment. Each moment is necessitated by the one that follows: there would be no literary writing without audience or readers, no reading without a quest for joy or a better life. Nonetheless, those successive instants are not assembled in a linear or teleological manner. They reanimate yesterday through literature’s now, so that what is past stays past and is present at the same time” (53).

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Literary works are products of the past but their writing is never over and functions in the present—reading’s now is the destiny of a literary text—while orienting readers towards a past as well as a future (the interpretation taking shape), leaving the readers of literature in several times at once. Dubreuil simultaneously warns of the limits of historical explanation while arguing that “seized in the temporal complication of its now, literature is an historic substance” (58).

So far, all the essays considered have answered the question “what is literature?” as if “now” directed our attention to how literature has been construed by recent critical approaches, with at least one of which each essay takes issue by arguing for a different understanding of what literature is. Even Dubreuil, who is concerned with literature’s now—the temporal-ity of literature—takes on the commonplaces of historical responses to the question: that literature in the modern sense is an invention of the late eighteenth and nineteenth century (Eric Gans’s essay offers a ver-sion of that story here). Taking as example Jacques Rancière’s La Parole muette, which traces a shift in Revolutionary France “from Belles-lettres to literature” (62), from works as imitations of actions to works as forms of language, Dubreuil argues that already for Aristotle language, rhythm, and music are essential to literature, even though he presents them as secondary to mimesis, in taking issue with the Greek practice of his day of defining poems according to the meter they use. And for Nicolas Boileau also, literary theorist of seventeenth-century France, many precepts are concerned with verse form, word choices, and linguistic register. Though there are certainly distinctive configurations in the concept of literature that comes into play with Flaubert and Mallarmé, their pronouncements on literature would not be shared by all contemporary novelists, for in-stance, and the attempt to define a modern concept of literature in op-position to those of earlier times both oversimplifies the range of modern possibilities and neglects powerful historical affinities. Scholars seeking the birth of literature allow their conceptual obsessions to masquerade as effective events. Dubreuil concludes, “there is no invention of litera-ture during the (post)revolutionary era, since all elements of ‘literary’ poetics were already there in Rancière’s belles lettres” (64). But on the other hand, literature is always being reinvented. T. S. Eliot remarked that the true masterpiece recasts those that precede it, and this sort of transformation is part of the complexity of literature’s now.

But the question “what is literature now?” most obviously asks not for the essence of literature but for what it has become today—no longer the unquestioned source of cultural capital that it once was, for example. Hagberg, who seeks to steer a middle course between an essentialist ac-count and the “flux” of seeing literature as a cultural variable, concludes that “Whatever else literature may be . . . it is one significant determinant

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of the contents of selfhood” (178). But is this still true now? Is that not the thrust of the question, “what is literature now?”

Until recently, at least, it was still possible to argue that, despite the cultural predominance of movies and television, literature was a primary determinant of cultural identities. For example, the scenarios suggesting that in Western culture people find themselves, become who they are or should be, in a monogamous amorous relationship with a member of the opposite sex, are literary in origin, even though most people may be most frequently exposed to versions of this narrative in movies and on television. But with the advent of new media, can we still make this argument for the foundational cultural function of literature? Perhaps it has become the noise of culture rather than its source of norms.

Phillip Wegner sees the concept of literature as “deeply imbricated in the rise of the nation-state and nationalism,” and with the age of globalization, the novel as the foremost expression of nationalism has become “a residual form”: we have moved from the novel, “through the dialectic of modernism and mass culture . . . into the emergent forms of twenty-first century literature and art only beginning to be realized through the new media technologies” (194). He reads William Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition as an account of how new media productions “have displaced the novel as the privileged artistic form” (191) for the fostering of the communities that arise in a globalized world around cultural activities and productions. But while the concept of literature has been displaced, Wegner argues “that it is, in fact, the older machin-ery [Gibson’s work is a novel, after all] that continues to dominate our present: the social, technological, and literary possibilities of the new media and globalization remain at best potentialities in a world still in the thrall of ‘undead’ forms of the novel and, even more significantly, the nation-state, both living on long past the moment when their progressive historical possibilities have been exhausted” (194). Though not likely to make us feel good about the condition of literature now, this is a claim for the persistent centrality of literary forms and thus literariness, even to the new discursive and representational order. Gibson is trying “to use the very tools of the old order, the form of the realist novel, in order to bury it” (198). Is this not an illustration of the intractable persistence of the divided time of literature, literature’s always problematic now?

A fuller account of new mediatic possibilities is Katherine Hayles’s fascinating “Intermediation: The Pursuit of a Vision.” Beginning with the bold apothem, “Literature in the twenty-first century is computational” (99)—though some of it only because it is composed on and processed by computers—Hayles focuses on electronic literature and its modes of interplay with computational devices that make possible recursive feedback loops of a sort characteristic of literary encounters. Echoing

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Wegner’s and Dubreuil’s conceptions of literature as a technology de-signed to change the cognition of the reader, she describes systems of what she calls “dynamic heterarchies,” processes of intermediation in which different levels of interaction continuously inform and mutually determine one another, as players or readers interact with the programs of electronic literature.

We have been accustomed to say, of great literature, that the text always has surprises in store, so that readers always find something new in it. Elec-tronic texts can literalize (and perhaps trivialize) this condition, through transformations determined by one algorithm or another, and they can become truly interactive when the program produces different textual results “depending on the precise dynamics of the player character’s ac-tions” (106). Hayles’s account of several different innovative electronic texts—afternoon: a story, Twelve Blue, The Jew’s Daughter, The Error Engine, and videos by Maria Mencia—provides a very engaging explanation, es-pecially for someone who has not been tempted by electronic literature, about the different sorts of interactive effects that can be achieved and the theoretical implications of some of these, including “the rupture of narrative and consequent re-imagining and re-presentation of con-sciousness not as a continuous stream but as the emergent result of local interactions between various neural processes and subcognitive agents, both biological and mechanical; the deconstruction of temporality and its reconstruction as an emergent phenomena arising from multiagent interactions” (121). While focusing on the various distinctive modes of interaction or intermediation that electronic literature engages, Hayles stresses the continuity between the functioning of these new textual modes and traditional literary works, which can also be seen as instruments to be played and devices to transform consciousness. And ultimately, it seems that electronic literature, like literature tout court, will end up being about the construction of meaning and thus about literature.

Perhaps the boldest claim about what literature is now comes from Eric Gans, who begins his essay with a capsule history of literature as national knowledge (to which he links what he sees as the postmodern victimary politics of current literary and cultural studies). If the novel carries the density of a nation’s life, it is important to read texts that do this for subaltern groups that have been marginalized. Like Wegner, he sees globalization as bringing the end of literature as expression of national life, but he argues that Proust, whom he claims has recently “become the principal literary icon of the twentieth century,” (37) is already “a transnational writer” (37), and, more important, one whose “weakly nar-rative, ‘intermittent’ life story” (38) is now the supreme achievement of that contemporary discursive form, the blog. The contemporary substitute for literature is the personal webpage or blog—the antipodes of the myth

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of literature, promoted by Proust and others, no doubt—but Proust’s novel “comes closer to the form of a blog than any other great work of literature” (39) and involves an attitude toward experience that is “a curious anticipation of our own. By maintaining the ambiguous status of his life experience as both wasted time and material for art, Proust was a forerunner of the bloggers of today” (39). Moreover, with the possibili-ties of instantaneous posting and endless archiving that today’s bloggers enjoy, “no one will have the tenacity to imitate Proust’s lifelong devotion to his oeuvre,” so “the absolute novel is already written” (40).

This remarkable claim, that not only does Proust anticipate the forms of literature to come but outdoes them all, suggests that literature now will just play itself out without coming up with anything new, but the one thing we know about literature is that it always seeks to outplay itself, in acts of reinvention that critics have not been able to imagine, and the essays collected here give us no compelling reason to doubt that literature now and tomorrow will continue to do so.

Cornell University

NOTE

1 Tzvetan Todorov, “The Notion of Literature,” New Literary History [this issue]: 11, origi-nally printed in New Literary History 5, no. 1 (1973): 5-16. All citations in this commentary are to essays in this issue and will be given parenthetically.

New Literary History, 2007, 38: 239–240

CONTRIBUTORS

Charles Altieri teaches modern poetry and some history of ideas at the Univer-sity of California—Berkeley. His most recent books are The Particulars of Rapture (2003) and The Art of Modern American Poetry (2006). He is now working on a book on Wallace Stevens and trying to recuperate the concept of appreciation.

Tony Bennett is Professor of Sociology at the Open University, a Director of the Economic and Social Science Research Centre on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC), Professorial Fellow in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His publications include Formalism and Marxism (1979); Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero (with Janet Woollacott, 1987); Outside Literature (1990); The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (1995); Culture: A Reformer’s Science (1998); Accounting for Tastes: Australian Everyday Cultures (with Michael Emmison and John Frow, 1999); and, most recently, Pasts Beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism (2004) and New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society (edited with Larry Grossberg and Meaghan Morris, 2005).

Terry Cochran is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Mon-treal. Author of Twilight of the Literary: Figures of Thought in the Age of Print (2001), his most recent book is Profession: comparatiste (2007). He is currently finishing up a manuscript on Atta et tous les autres: foi et savoir dans la pensée du sacrifice humain.

Jonathan Culler is Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Lit-erature at Cornell University. His most recent book is The Literary in Theory (2006).

Laurent Dubreuil is Assistant Professor in French and Francophone Literatures and the Director of the French Studies Program at Cornell University. His re-search explores the relations between literary thought and conceptual knowledge (from philosophy to social thought). He is an editorial board member of the journals Labyrinthe and Diacritics. “What Is Literature’s Now?” is a part of a new book project entitled The Indiscipline of Literary Studies.

Eric Gans attended Columbia College and the Johns Hopkins University, where he received his doctorate in Romance Languages in 1966. He has taught French literature, critical theory, and film at UCLA since 1969, and written a number of books and articles on aesthetic theory as well as on Flaubert, Musset, Racine, and other French writers. Beginning with The Origin of Language (1981), Gans

New Literary History, Volume 38, 2007 - Table of Contents

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Culler, Jonathan D. ● Commentary: What Is Literature Now?

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