Something on the Meaning of Literature

Presented with the question, "What is the meaning of Literature?"

Such a broad question deserves a broad response. I take by the framing of the question and responses that we are proposing "meaning" as the objective purpose, and not the subjective "meaning" of personal relations. For fun, let us take a soft Marxist point of view. So I half-heartedly assert: Literature is in part an attempt to rectify language into an imitation of nature (where painting or sculture actually imitated nature). Though after the Industrial Revolution and subsequent onset of nationalism, all literature is destined to become a mode of propoganda.

Therefore, the meaning (as objective purpose) can be said to be twofold:

1. an imitation of nature (beauty)
2. propoganda (politics)

I might go so far as to assert the primary and perhaps defining dialectic of literature is in these factors. The Imitation of nature (beauty) is the demeanor of the work, i.e., the outward appearance and means of appeal to the reader. But the nature of the work is, in one way or another, propoganda; it either promotes the status-quo (decadence, bourgeois) or calls for change (revolution).

See: Kant; Walter Benjamin, Horkheimer and Adorno, et al.

In addition, we must be careful to not confuse the meaning of "writing" with the meaning of "literature."

Excerpts from The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception