The Social Construction of Literature

Romantic art, including literature, has presented itself in terms of transcendencies, locating its origins, finding its language, and explaining its functions in the deeps of the unconscious self, the cosmic struggles of Apollonian and Dionysiac energies, the ancient myths of Edenic past and apocalyptic future, darkling Oedipal wrestlings with precursor poets and, most recently, the emptiness of the abyss. Centered in these worlds of spirit, romantic literature has offered itself to the world, with great success, as a manifestation of an unchanging and distinctively human psychic essence, an epistemological and linguistic absolute, a Universalpoesie, the true voice of mankind appearing in all cultures at all times. As these concepts came to seem so real and true as to be unquestionable, the word literature gradually lost its older and broader eighteenth-century meaning of all secular writing of excellence on serious subjects and increasingly meant a special group of texts that, as the primary products of the poetic imagination, share a number of essential literary characteristics such as fictionality and form: and make use of certain key literary tropes like metaphor, symbol and irony.

But, as we have, perhaps, entered a postindustrial society, and as print has certainly begun to give way to electronics as the primary mode of communication in the late twentieth century, romantic literature increasingly has seemed less and less a fact of nature and more and more a single episode in a much longer history of letters in western society. There are hints that if we knew enough to construct meaningful comparisons with the literary systems of other advanced cultures, a true comparative literature, that is, romantic literature, would be revealed to be even less a cultural or human absolute and more a product of a particular time and place. But as the ideology of romantic art has ceased to command belief or just to be of interest to many people, this change alone has made it inescapably obvious that literature, along with the other arts, is a part of culture, existing in the day-to-day world as both a subjective concept and a set of objective social realities. Literature now appears increasingly as, for example, not only a canon of literary texts and a few geniuses of the poetic imagination, but as a set of well-defined and lived-out literary roles such as poet, critic, scholar, teacher, student, editor, reviewer, and so forth. Its social reality has been substantively reinforced, we can now understand, by a corpus of secondary legitimations such as literary criticism, history, biographies, bibliographies, and carefully edited texts and concordances, all of which testify to the existence of literature, define it, organize it, and impute to it a cultural importance that justifies this kind of careful preservation and interpretation. We can see literature as objectively real in a corpus of texts, an actualized canon, in libraries where it exists as a designated part of the collection and is visibly schematized in shelving and classification systems that order literature internally and differentiate it externally from other categories of knowledge. The epistemological status conferred on literature by its existence in the library is extended and hardened in the educational system, where literature’s bona fide as a mode of knowledge is established by a faculty and a department of specialists in the subject, a structured curriculum, and a degree certifying competence in its study. Like any other social reality, literature is also involved in various ways with the larger social world, where its existence is acknowledged and its nature affected by glancing interactions with other social realities such as encounters with wealth through patronage, the state through censorship, the law through libel and pornography statutes, and the marketplace through publishers, printers, and readers. Here in this larger world, literature has come to occupy a well-defined place in society’s official paradigm of knowledge, as objectified in encyclopedias, academies of arts and sciences, library catalogue systems and university curricula. In earlier times, to use a famous and durable example, poetry was the intermediate term between history and philosophy, but since the late eighteenth century, literature—figured not just as poetry but as all types of “creative writing”: poems, novels, plays, essays, biographies, and the like—has been located in the knowledge tree as one of the fine arts, which in turn are a part of high culture, which exists in a structuralist contrast to folk and pop culture. In another direction, literature is defined as a humane art by an opposition to science.