WHAT IS LITERATURE?

by Nathan Coppedge, via Quora.com


I have pondered this question long and hard, and the first definite conclusion I reached is that 'literature is bad philosophy'. 

That is, to clarify, literature is that beautiful substance which arises from problems. 

Only, this wasn't my last conclusion. My next conclusion was that literature is bad poetry. 

That is, what literature can do, poetry can eventually do much better, and all good literature is eventually classified as poetry or discarded. Efficiency alone might save this thesis, since the average poem is shorter than the average novel. 

But I did not stop there. I decided, if literature is bad philosophy and the literature can be saved becomes good poems, then maybe literature is evidence of God! 

In this case, what we find in an average university's graduate school English program is not literature at all --- but something very interesting. 

So, I decided, literature has something to do with being very interesting (on a profound level, like raising censor vapors). 

If that was the case, then what could I do to find a decent, ideal theory of what literature means? I decided finally that literature is meaningful writing.That's all that it is.


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