What is Literature?

What is literature?

What is literature?(After M.A)

Etymologically, the term literature derives from Latin literatura/litteratura "learning, a writing, grammar", originally "writing formed with letters", from litera/littera "letter". In spite of this, the term has also been applied to spoken or sung texts. Literature is often referred to synecdochally as "writing", especially creative writing, and poetically as "the craft of writing" (or simply "the craft"). Syd Field described his discipline, screenwriting, as "a craft that occasionally rises to the level of art."

Oral literature is an ancient human tradition found in "all corners of the world". Modern archaeology has been unveiling evidence of the human efforts to preserve and transmit arts and knowledge that depended completely or partially on an oral tradition, across various cultures:

The Judeo-Christian Bible reveals its oral traditional roots; medieval European manuscripts are penned by performing scribes; geometric vases from archaic Greece mirror Homer's oral style. (...) Indeed, if these final decades of the millennium have taught us anything, it must be that oral tradition never was the other we accused it of being; it never was the primitive, preliminary technology of communication we thought it to be. Rather, if the whole truth is told, oral tradition stands out as the single most dominant communicative technology of our species as both a historical fact and, in many areas still, a contemporary reality.

The earliest poetry is believed to have been recited or sung, employed as a way of remembering history, genealogy, and law.

In Asia, the transmission of folklore, mythologies as well as scriptures in ancient India, in different Indian religions, was by oral tradition, preserved with precision with the help of elaborate mnemonic techniques.

The early Buddhist texts are also generally believed to be of oral tradition, with the first by comparing inconsistencies in the transmitted versions of literature from various oral societies such as the Greek, Serbia and other cultures, then noting that the Vedic literature is too consistent and vast to have been composed and transmitted orally across generations, without being written down.

"literature" has another sense in which it refers to a proper subclass of writings . Traditionally, literature is taken to be a body of writings.  Since so much of literature is fiction, it is tempting to suppose that literature can be equated with fiction. A literary work is a work that uses language to create a fiction. Unfortunately, it is evident that being fiction is neither necessary nor sufficient for being literature. Fiction pervades everyday life. We are bombarded with it by advertising agencies. We constantly create little fictions when thinking about such things as what to do. If being verbal fiction were sufficient for being literature, then, not only advertising and ail our homemade fictions, but pulp novels, comic books, jokes, and philosopher's imaginary examples would ail be literature. You may think that some of these things are literature, but I doubt that you think ail of them are. If so, you agree that being fiction does not suffice for being literature.

Evidently, the distinction between fiction and nonfiction will no provide the principle for distinguishing literature from non-literature that we are looking for. However, it is not an accident that, when we think of paradigmatic works of literature, we usually think of fiction Works of fiction constitute the heart of literature.

Literature as Imaginative Writing: A number of writers concur that it is sometime in the 19th Century that the body of writings to be collected under the label "literature came to be identified with writing that could properly be considered art, and this, in turn, came to be conceived of as imaginative writing. "Imaginative" also does not refers to something a writer must do to create a work of literature. Rather, it refers to a range of values for which works of literature have characteristically been appreciated. Literary value is often identified as aesthetic value, the value of the experience of a literature

Aristotle's discussion of the probable and necessary was hardened into three things, that like truth (resficta), that not like truth (fabula), the true itself (fama). His belief that poetry is a sort of moral philosophy (p. 16) is associated with the catharsis, as is made abundantly clear in his comment on Chapter 6 of the Poetics (p. 98).