The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [2]
Literary productions as a whole; the body of writings produced in a particular country or period, or in the world in general. Now also in a more restricted sense, applied to writing which has claim to consideration on the ground of beauty of form or emotional effect. (Oxford English Dictionary 3a.)
It’s worth noting that the first instance of this use of the term given in the historical dictionary of the English language is comparatively recent—1812—hundreds of years after Chaucer and Shakespeare (and, of course, thousands of years after the Greek and Latin “classics”). Thus, over the centuries in England, the U.S., and indeed in France, “literature” has changed from a personal attribute or characteristic (something one has) to an institution and a product (something one writes or knows).
Concurrent with this development was the emergence of a personage called a “man of letters,” whose profession was the production of literary work, whether or not he—or, latterly, she—actually earned a living by writing. Here is Sir Walter Scott, one of the most financially successful of nineteenth-century novelists: “I determined that literature should be my staff, but not my crutch, and that the profits of my literary labour … should not … become necessary to my ordinary expenses.”8 For Scott, literature was a product of “labour” and produced “profits” of a pecuniary as well as of a more rarefied kind. Despite his disclaimer, he speaks here as a professional man.
At the same time that a specifically high-cultural sense of literature was coming into currency, what we might call the general case of literature as meaning any body of writing on a given subject (“the scientific literature”) was developing, again concurrent with the establishment of academic and technical disciplines, each of which was supported and buttressed by specialist publications that came to be called a “literature.” And below that, if we might speak for a moment in terms of cultural hierarchy, was the most general case of all, the equation of literature with all printed matter. It’s instructive to see the sequence of examples offered by the OED for what it still calls a colloquial usage:
1895 “In canvassing, in posters, and in the distribution of what, by a profane perversion of language, is called ‘literature.’ ”
1900 “A more judicious distribution of posters, and what is termed ‘literature.’ ”
1938 “It is some literature from the Travel Bureau.”
1962 “Full details and literature from: Yugoslav National Tourist Office.”
1973 “I talked my throat dry, gave away sheaves of persuasive literature.”
Where, at the end of the nineteenth century, this use of the term was deemed profane and perverse, and thus encased in scare quotes, by the late twentieth century (the citation is from a 1973 crime novel by Dick Francis), the word literature no longer needed parsing or protecting and was routinely used to describe flyers, brochures, and other disposable printed stuff.
So the meanings of literature as a term have, perhaps paradoxically, moved both “up” and “down” in recent years. On the one hand, it now seems to denote a particular reading, writing, and publishing practice associated with middle to high culture, with the notion of a literary canon, and with English majors; on the other hand, it has been co-opted—or universalized—so that it means just about anything professional—or research-based—written in words.
In the pages that follow I will attempt not only to argue for but also to invoke and demonstrate the “uses” of reading and of literature, not as an instrument of moral or cultural control, nor yet as an infusion