What is Literature?

Half of my grad school experience, so far, has been about asking better questions.

In seminar, we tackled this huge question—what is literature? Maybe if I were to ask you this question verbatim, you would answer something like “literature is a story with a beginning, middle, or end,” or maybe you would start telling me about Charles Dickens or Jane Austen-esque literary authors, or maybe you would list a few qualities of good books you’ve read. (Sorry for putting words into your mouth, but play along!)

The “high theory” surrounding the discussion seems to be that “What is literature?” is a bad question. We’re like archeologists picking away at a dig site; we’re able to identify the type of sediment and the surrounding rocks, but we’re just digging around aimlessly looking for a fossil that may or may not exist. Our instinct to define characteristics of literature is supposedly not defining literature itself, but what it ought to be.

Once I had a conversation with my friend Gage about art. We were talking about what constitutes “art” because, like, what a question! He asked “is tv art?” and I annoyingly said, “idk if tv is art, but I definitely think our relationship to it is.” And basically, I feel the same way about literature. A story in a book is literature, sure, but what is its purpose, and what is your relationship to it? Why do we insist that the Twilight Saga isn’t literature when positioned against A Tale of Two Cities? Why are we so adamant against including Colleen Hoover in the same conversation as George Orwell? It seems that non-Western literature is relegated closer to the realm of cultural studies and exists as a deviation from the default of the European literary canon. And for what! Anyway, I welcome your thoughts.

Other Disjointed Musings:

• Grad school has been a lot of me separating myself from the academic ego and willingly giving in to the American Chaos. When I was an ESL teacher, the louder students who had the confidence to make mistakes and let me participate in their thought process were way more likely to receive the feedback they needed, while also making the classroom fun! This is to say that I made a few mistakes in Korean class today and my teacher said that I was funny. 🤙
• Making the mental leap from “English Muffin” to “Crumpet” was a surprising journey I didn’t expect to make. This thought deserves its own space because I’ve been thinking about it for days.
• I’m learning how to play the gayageum (가야금)!
• Stay and Fight is an audiobook that I recently finished while taking long walks through the city. The book was written by Madeline ffitch, who used to teach at our beloved Athens Girls Rock Camp. While SOAS is expanding my literary horizons, Stay and Fight is a familiar riverbank and Appalachian foothills. The audiobook narrator affects a familiar twang that warms my heart and reminds me of my roots. My ongoing battle as a reader is balancing my love of libraries and audiobooks with the itching desire to read with pen in hand—liberally underlining passages and dog-earring pages for the evolving narrative of my personality.

Relevant passage from my recent read:

“There are many horizons that must be visited, fruit that must be plucked, books read, and white pages in the scrolls of life to be inscribed with vivid sentences in a bold hand.”

Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih (translated by Denys Johnson-Davies)

On my mind lately:

• New Hozier song, “Swan Upon Leda”
• The Stray Kids comeback album, Maxident released!
• The Underground Village, a short story by Kang Kyeong-ae