What Is Literature?

The other day in class we were discussing the meaning of literature and trying to categorize different books, maps, brochures, etc. into what we thought was literature and what we thought didn’t make the cut. After, we went around the class and attempted to define what we thought literature was, only to find that it was quite subjective and not really something that everyone can agree on. So, after class I was thinking about our discussion and people’s opinions on what they thought literature was and I started to come up with my own definition. While I think it is impossible to put an objective definition to something subjective, this is what I came up with. I think that literature is like music. In music, technically, in order to be called music it needs to be intended to be heard as music by its composer and also needs to be perceived as music by its audience. For example, there is a piece of music called 4’33” (4 Minutes 33 Seconds) which consists of a pianist walking out on stage, starting a stop watch, flipping the pages of the score at directed times, getting up and taking a bow, and waking off the stage. The pianist never plays a note. Most people wouldn’t consider this music. But, composer John Cage intended it to be music. The music, he claims, is the sounds of the pianist’s footsteps across the stage, the sound of the stopwatch, the coughing from the audience, and the hum of the air conditioner in the background. What makes it music is that people in the audience actually perceived it as music and, while at first they were skeptical, eventually people began to applaud John Cage for his work of music. I believe that this also refers to literature as well. Just as we all have different favorite music artists, we also all have different favorite authors. I actually believe that literature and music can be very similar in their subjective definitions. An older person probably doesn’t consider screamo music to actually be categorized as music. This is because they do not perceive it as music. But there are plenty of teens around the country and the world that perceive it as music and listen to it on a daily basis. “50 Shades of Gray” is a popular book that many people perceive as literature. My roommate doesn’t perceive it that way. My roommate believes that it is “fan-fiction” and doesn’t deserve to be called literature. There are plenty of people who read “50 Shades of Gray” and believe it to be a captivating piece of literature that they enjoyed reading. What I’m saying is that music and literature are similar because they are perceived differently by different people. The perception of both literature and music vary with generation, age, gender, and race. It’s not a coincidence that Twilight appeals to many girls and does not appeal to a majority of guys. It is because Twilight was perceived as literature much more commonly in girls. Another example would be Moby Dick or Grapes of Wrath. People of older generations and age will consider these two novels to be literature. But people of my generation and age group, including teens in high school, would dread reading both novels because they are long and considered to be a dry read by most people of that sociodemographic. That particular sociodemographic is more likely to consider texting and digital messages like e-mails as literature. My point is I believe that literature is something that needs to be intended to be literature by its author and perceived to be literature by an audience. That is what makes something literature. There is no concrete definition that will be able to sort a collection of words into piles of ‘literature’ and ‘not literature’. Everybody’s pile is different.