What is Literature?
Talking about literature and what it is can never end. The reason for that is the lack of a strict definition that will tell what actually literature is and everyone will agree on that one. Literature is not math so that two and two is four. The term Literature is so broad that thinking about one definition and giving just one explanation is impossible because there are always questions that go without a full and right answer. It is normal people to have different opinions about what is literature.
Reading novels that date centuries, dramas based on situations that really happened in the past also reading boring novels and heart-touching ones. In those classes it was discussed about novels based on a real event and other ones just made up. Poetry was an interesting part of the classes and analyzing short fiction stories was also interesting. Some courses teach songs’ lyrics as a part of the literature curriculum. Consequently the question “What is literature”, it is just a never ending topic.
If those songs were not in written form, would we still count them as literature. So, literature should be something that is written. On one hand we have this: novels, poems, songs and dramas and on the other hand we have written letter, newspaper, scientific book, brochures and written advertisement.
There can not be a strict line between the first ones and the second ones. The reason is that all those texts differ from each other because they are written in different style and tone. There are also rules that tell how a short story should look like and in which way the poem should be written, but yet there are no strict rules how literature should look like. For example, a letter can have a content that more or less reminds on a love song and yet be a letter. There can be a story that could be published in a newspaper and yet is a story. These two parts have connection with one another but yet the first ones follow a kind of rules and norms but that is also the case with the second ones. The point is the difference is in the usage of the literature figures and how well the language is crafted in those texts.
The short story that O’Connor had published in that time made people to thing that was a real event and yet today people count it as a literature work. Hemingway was a journalist, yet his stories in newspapers are not considered as a literature work.
All in all, something to be literature should be in a written form that will provide a kind of information. First think that comes to mind when the word literature is mentioned, is that on the end of an essay most people would write “the literature that was used” as they would think on bibliography. Even though we use internet sites, different books, maybe also a brochure people still count that as a literature. Maybe it is probably the way people use complicated words to refer to simple things.
