What is Literature?

Before Post-Graduation

After Post-Graduation

"The guardians of our memory (the writers, the artistes, the scribes, the journalists, the painters, the singers, the dancers and the musicians) - they are dropping dead from the sky." - Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

While reading my own pre-Master's understanding of literature, I feel my perspective has evolved fundamentally. From Plato to Stephen Gosson, poetry faced opposition. However, Aristotle, by defining tragedy, stated that literature achieves "through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions." Wordsworth described poetry as "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," while Coleridge defined it as "secondary imagination." Matthew Arnold claimed literature is "criticism of life." Then came T.S. Eliot with his "Tradition and the Individual Talent."

All these definitions were challenged with the emergence of deconstruction. As I engaged with these ideas through my Master's studies, my understanding evolved. Initially, I believed literature was simply a mirror of life a clichéd metaphor. As I studied further, my understanding developed. Literature provides geographical, cultural, religious, and critical insights into texts and ultimately into society. The Victorians believed in "literature as art for life's sake," whereas the Decadents considered "literature as art for art's sake."

Literature is expression of human existence and is highly political, offering kaleidoscopic view to readers. After the emergence of deconstruction theory, language came to be seen as inherently incapable of articulating complete meaning. Since literature is written in form of language whether novels, plays, poetry, films, web series, advertisements, pamphlets, journalism it inherently generates meaning. As Terry Eagleton and Karl Marx argued, literature is highly political and ideological, shaped by social conditions of its time. New historicists like Stephen Greenblatt emphasized historical understanding of literature as reflection of its era, highlighting societal mistakes to prevent recurrence or alert readers to choose sides consciously.

Literature is now changing its form into electronic literature, digitally generated texts, and social media posts. Connecting this with Cultural Studies, particularly Raymond Williams' assertion that "the everyday is important," the making of culture becomes the making of literature. We now go beyond referring to texts and instead define them as artifacts. I never thought that painting, photographs, or selfies could be interconnected with literature.

Cultural Studies showcases that literature is about power and representation. Michel Foucault's idea of power driving knowledge and Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony reveal that literature is representation of power. Literature serves as medium to expose pitfalls of society its darker sides, biases, and mistakes.

The literature written by Orientalists and the colonized highlights power of literature to represent marginalization. Whether addressing binaries such as high and low culture, male and female, master and slave, or self and Other, it consistently provides alternative narrative, which is crucial.

As Derrida emphasized "the metaphysics of absence," and Chimamanda Adichie asserted that "stories must be told," at its core, literature is ultimately about storytelling. As Rabindranath Tagore metaphorically described it as "Temple and Mahakal," literature endures across time.

Rather than shallow understanding of literature as merely medium for delight and moral teaching, it transcends these definitions. Literature reaches its zenith when it surpasses shackles of language, time, geography, and culture to become morpheme of abstract ideas connecting human consciousness across boundaries, revealing what power structures attempt to conceal, and providing frameworks for understanding complexity of existence itself.