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Commentary: What Is Literature Now?

Jonathan Culler

he 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 differential 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 functionsa set of stories that
seduce readers into accepting the hierarchical structures of society, and
a practice where ideology is challenged or subvertedbut 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 characteristics 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 ones 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 frameworkweeds are plants that are not wanted in
the lawn or gardenso 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 literature 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 nave
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 Todorovs implied conclusion, 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 disagreeindeed, 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 representation, 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 questionWhat 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 Altieris 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 Browns attempt to realize in criticism William Carlos
Williamss slogan, no ideas but in things, while arguing that these approaches 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 sensuousness, 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 institutionalized 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 literature 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.
Cochrans antagonist is not just the academy but the general representation 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 Freuds use of literature as a sounding 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, however, 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 lyce 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 precious little knowledge of literary genres, forms, or critical techniquesand
not necessarily a greater enthusiasm for literature than French students.

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Todorovs complaint may well make American academics enviousthat


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 selfdivision or self-reflexivity. It might be pertinent to note that Jacques
Derridas own writings on literary works, whether by Kafka, Celan,
Joyce, or Blanchot, link literature with a host of political, ethical, and
philosophical issuesthe 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 innocent 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 todays 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 (2627) 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 collection, takes up the question What is literature? by focusing on the
special temporality of literaturethe 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 transforming other discoursesliterature 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 literatures
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 presentreadings now is the destiny of a literary
textwhile 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 literatures nowthe temporality of literaturetakes 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 Ganss essay offers a version of that story here). Taking as example Jacques Rancires 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 Mallarm, their pronouncements
on literature would not be shared by all contemporary novelists, for instance, and the attempt to define a modern concept of literature in opposition 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 literature during the (post)revolutionary era, since all elements of literary
poetics were already there in Rancires 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 literatures now.
But the question what is literature now? most obviously asks not for
the essence of literature but for what it has become todayno longer
the unquestioned source of cultural capital that it once was, for example.
Hagberg, who seeks to steer a middle course between an essentialist account 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 Gibsons
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 machinery [Gibsons 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, literatures always problematic now?
A fuller account of new mediatic possibilities is Katherine Hayless
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 computersHayles 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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Wegners and Dubreuils conceptions of literature as a technology designed 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. Electronic 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 characters actions (106). Hayless account of several different innovative electronic
textsafternoon: a story, Twelve Blue, The Jews Daughter, The Error Engine,
and videos by Maria Menciaprovides a very engaging explanation, especially 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 consciousness 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 nations 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 narrative, 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 blogthe antipodes of the myth

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of literature, promoted by Proust and others, no doubtbut Prousts


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 possibilities of instantaneous posting and endless archiving that todays bloggers
enjoy, no one will have the tenacity to imitate Prousts 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, originally 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.

CONTRIBUTORS
Charles Altieri teaches modern poetry and some history of ideas at the University of CaliforniaBerkeley. 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 Reformers 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 atthe University of Montreal. 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
upa manuscript on Atta et tous les autres: foi et savoirdans la pense du sacrifice
humain.
Jonathan Culler is Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature 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 research 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 Literatures 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, 2007, 38: 239240

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

participation.

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

Contributors

Contributors
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Books Received

Books Received
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Subject Headings:
Literature -- History and criticism -- Bibliography.

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