And What Is Literature Anyway?

From Finn Harvor's interview with Patrick Crean:

2. And what is literature, anyway? Should the traditional novel be considered the prime example of it?

Ezra Pound put it succinctly when he said – and I paraphrase - that literature was news that stayed relevant. He meant those works of fiction, of the imagination that will last and be read years from now. It is interesting to look at the bestseller lists, say, of the 1920s, where one would be hard-pressed to recognize virtually anything that is read today, with a few notable exceptions. As someone said: Today’s bestseller lists are tomorrow’s obituary columns.

I think there are other forms than the novel that do serve this vital purpose, works of philosophy and ideas, as well as literary non-fiction such as Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, and Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, to name a few ‘creative’ non-fiction titles – but finally, yes, I think it is the novel that still has pride of place in the sense of embodying what is vital to the culture because it deploys language and the use of the human imagination in ways no other literary form does.

Comments

[Brian Hadd]

I think adding questions about time to form are random wrong, but admit to novel reads oftener. Poetry probably I would say.