Terry Eagleton on the Rise of English

2019 Words9 Pages
The text of “Literature and the Rise of English” is an excerpt from two chapters of terry Eagleton’s seminal book Literary Theory: An Introduction. In the first seven pages of the chapter “Introduction: What is Literature?” Eagleton considers and refutes two major definitions of literature. I Literature can be defined as imaginative writing. A history of literature disputes this definition since all literature is not fiction. Francis Bacon’s essays and John Donne’s sermons are also literature. A definition of literature cannot be arrived at through the distinction between fact and fiction. II The Formalist definition of literature focuses on language. Literature is characterised by the use of language that is ‘intensified’ and ‘transformed’, language that ‘deviates systematically from everyday speech.’ Language has ‘texture, rhythm and resonance that is in excess of … extractable meaning.’ Thus Russian Formalism, a critical school that emerged in the second decade of twentieth century considered the literary as language that is defamiliarized through the use of devices. Formalists used the findings of structural linguistics to analyse literature and demonstrated how through judicious use of different devices, literature attempted at ‘making strange’ what was familiar and ordinary. Language thus becomes self-conscious and self-referential, inviting attention to itself as language. This approach appears to be adequate to account for the dense language of poetry, but quite a lot of literature is just ordinary language, as dialogues in novels or plays, for example. More over, a clever reader can read any writing as defamiliarised language. Literature therefore cannot be fruitfully defined in terms of a set of essential features that can be extracted from a reading of texts. It is at best an empty category with only a formal significance. Paragraph
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