Unit 1 The Art of Literature笔怎么画
What is literature? What is not literature? What makes us treat something as literature while dismissing others as non-literature? The questions are rarely answered clearly. This unit focus on the nature of literature.
Part I Text A
Lead-in
Do you think the following forms of writing can be counted as literature?
□news report
□novel
□rearch paper北京考生
□diary
□poem
□letter
Now read Text A and e whether your answers to the previous question will be changed.
The Scope and Content of Literature1
Kenneth Rexroth
The Scope of Literature我爱你北京
Literature is a form of human expression. But not everything expresd in words — even when organized and written down — is counted as literature. Tho writings that are primarily informative — technical, scholarly, journalistic — would be excluded from the rank of literature by most, though not all, critics. Certain forms of writing, however, are universally regarded as belonging to literature as an art. Individual attempts within the forms are said to succeed if they posss something called artistic merit and to fail if they
do not. The nature of artistic merit is less easy to define than to recognize. The writer need not even pursue it to attain it. On the contrary, a scientific exposition might be of great literary value and a pedestrian poem of none at all.
孙悟空墓The purest (or, at least, the most inten) literary form is the lyric poem, and after it comes elegiac, epic, dramatic, narrative, and expository ver. Most theories of literary criticism ba themlves on an analysis of poetry, becau the 陀螺比赛aesthetic problems of literature are there prented in their simplest and purest form. Poetry that fails as literature is not called poetry at all but ver. Many novels — certainly all the world’s great novels — are literature, but there are thousands that are not so considered. Most great dramas are considered literature (although the Chine, posssors of one of the world’s greatest dramatic traditions, consider their plays, with few exceptions, to posss no literary merit whatsoever).
The Greeks thought of history as one of the ven arts, inspired by a goddess, the mu Clio2. All of the world’s classic surveys of history can stand as noble examples of the art
of literature, but most historical works and studies today are not written primarily with literary excellence in mind, though they may posss it, as it were, by accident.
The essay was once written deliberately as a piece of literature; its subject matter was of comparatively minor importance. Today most essays are written as expository, informative journalism, although there are still essayists in the great tradition who think of themlves as artists. Now, as in the past, some of the greatest essayists are critics of literature, drama, and the arts.
Some personal documents (autobiographies, diaries, memoirs, and letters) rank among the world’s greatest literature. Some examples of this biographical literature were written with posterity in mind, others with no thought of their being read by anyone but the writer. Some are in a highly polished literary style; others win their standing as literature becau of their cogency, insight, depth, and scope.
Many works of philosophy are clasd as literature. The Dialogues3 of Plato (4th century BC) are written with great narrative skill and in the finest pro; the Meditations
4 of the cond-century Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius are a collection of apparently random thoughts, and the Greek in which they are written is eccentric. Yet both are clasd as literature, while the speculations of other philosophers, ancient and modern, are not.
Certain scientific works endure as literature long after their scientific content has become outdated. This is particularly true of books of natural history, where the element of personal obrvation is of special importance. An excellent example is Gilbert White’s Natural History and Antiquities of Selbourne 5 (1789).
Oratory, the art of persuasion, was long considered a great literary art. The oratory of the American Indian, for instance, is famous, while in classical Greece, Polymnia6 was the mu sacred to poetry and oratory. Rome’s great orator Cicero7 was to have a decisive influence on the development of English pro style. Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address8 is known to every American schoolchild. Today, however, oratory is more usually thought of as a craft than as an art.
Most critics would not admit advertising copywriting, purely commercial fiction, or cinema and television scripts as accepted forms of literary expression, although others would hotly dispute their exclusion. The test in individual cas would em to be one of enduring satisfaction and, of cour, truth.
Indeed, it becomes more and more difficult to categorize literature, for in modern civilization words are everywhere. Man is subject to a continuous flood of communication. Most of it is fugitive, but here and there — in high-level journalism, in television, in the cinema, in commercial fiction, in westerns and detective stories, and in plain, expository pro — some writing, almost by accident, achieves an aesthetic satisfaction, a depth and relevance that entitle it to stand with other examples of the art of literature.
Content of Literature
Themes and their sources. The subject matter of literature is as wide as human experience itlf. Myths, legends, and folktales lie at the beginning of literature, and their plots, situations, and allegorical (metaphorical narrative) judgments of life reprent a con兰戈电影
stant source of literary inspiration that never fails. This is so becau mankind is constant — men share a common physiology. Even social structures, after the development of cities, remain much alike. Whole civilizations have a life pattern that repeats itlf through history. Jung’s term “collective unconscious” 9 really means that mankind is one species, with a common fund of general experience. Egyptian scribes and junior executives in New York City live and respond to life in the same ways; the lives of farmers or miners or hunters vary only within narrow limits. Love is love and death is death, for a South African Bushman10 and a French 白及的功效与作用Surrealist alike. So the themes of literature have at once an infinite variety and an abiding学雷锋精神手抄报 constancy. They can be taken from myth, from history, or from contemporary occurrence, or they can be pure invention (but even if they are invented, they are nonetheless constructed from the constant materials of real experience, no matter how fantastic the invention).
