What Is Literature?

郭庆

What Is Literature?

Is a Batman comic book “literature”? What about a physical book? A restaurant menu? A university catalog? A television sitcom? A political speech? The letter we write home?

Back about the middle of the twentieth century, critics thought they knew what literature was and thus the answer to such questions. The so-called New Critics, who flourished in the United States from the 1920s until 1960s, believed that literature had certain properties that experts trained in that writing and studying of the literature could identify---such things as imagery, metaphor, meter, rhyme, irony, and plot. The New Critics confidently identified and evaluated works of literature, elevating the “great” works of literature to high status. Literature for them consisted, with but few exceptions, of poetry, drama, and fiction and definitely not have included the kinds of writing listed at the beginning of this chapter.

Beginning in the 1960s, however, critics questioned the concept of literature expounded by New Critics. The New Critics, they noted, seemed narrow in policing the literary “canon”—that unofficial collection of works that critics deem worthy of admiration and study…

文学是什么？

蝙蝠侠连环画是文学吗？物理课本，餐厅菜单，大学目录，电视情景喜剧，政治演讲，家书，这些是文学吗？

大约在20世纪中期，评论家们认为他们知道了文学是什么，因此知道了类似问题的答案。20世纪二十年代到六十年代，美国兴起了一派所谓的新评论家。他们认为文学有固定的特征—比如比喻，暗喻，韵律，押韵，反语和情节—而这些特征是接受过文学创作和文学研究的专家们能够识别的。

新评论家按照自己的标准对文学作品进行鉴定和评估，一些“伟大”的文学作品的地位得到了很大提高。对他们来说，文学只包括诗歌，喜剧，小说，而在这章开头列出的那些文章类型很显然没有包括其中。

然而，从20世纪六十年代开始，评论家就对由新评论家定义的文学概念提出了质疑。他们注意到在维护文学准则时，对于那些评论家认为值得推崇和学习的非官方收集的文学作品，新评论家似乎提高了要求。

Cinderella

as imagery, metaphor, meter, rhyme, irony, and plot比喻，暗喻，韵律，押韵，反语和情节____ 意象、暗喻、音步、押韵、反语和情节