Doaa’s Reviews > How to Read Literature > Status Update

Depth of insight, truth- to- life, formal unity, universal appeal, moral complexity, verbal inventiveness, imaginative vision: all of these have been proposed at one time or another as marks of literary greatness, not to speak of one or two more dubious criteria such as giving voice to the indomitable spirit of the nation, or stepping up the rate of steel production by portraying steel workers as epic heroes.

What puts us in place is a history over which we have little control, and of which we may know almost nothing. This heritage is woven into our flesh, veins, bones and organs as much as into our social conditions. We are dependent for our existence, and thus for our very freedom and autonomy, on a lineage of other individuals and events, one too tangled ever to be fully unravelled.

In any case, works of literature do not mean just one thing. They are capable of generating whole repertoires of meaning, some of which alter as history itself changes, and not all of which may be consciously intended.

One of the things we mean by calling a piece of writing ‘literary’ is that it is not tied to a specific context. It is true that all literary works arise from particular conditions.

One of the most common ways of overlooking the ‘literariness’ of a play or novel is to treat its characters as though they were actual people.

Almost all literary works begin by using words that have been used countless times before, though not necessarily in this particular combination. We can grasp the meaning of these opening sentences only because we come to them with a frame of cultural reference which allows us to do so. We also approach them with some conception of what a literary work is, what is meant by a beginning, and so on.

Learning how to be a literary critic is, among other things, a matter of learning how to deploy certain techniques.