What is literature?

Eagleton exposed different ways of seeing what literature could be; but, he also gave arguments that showed that those different ways of seeing what literature is could be wrong or at least mistaken. This could be mainly because sometimes it is hard to tell whether a text is literature or not; and actually, despite it is very hard to distinguish when a text is literature or not, the real difficulty is not to say if a text is literature, because the real difficulty is not to tell whether it is literature or nor, but to know why it is literature or why not. Eagleton gave to the reader some examples in which sometimes different perspectives of seen what literature is works perfectly, but others in which those definitions do not work. And finally, Eagleton do not show a clear definition of what literature is, because there is not such definition.

There are different examples that are given to the reader have both strengths and weaknesses. And there is one that specially caught my attention which summed means that anything you think is literature is literature. This sets the definition to something very simple and very subjective. But, that also means that if two people have different opinions of whether a text is literature or not there would be like a shock. However, I actually found this definition very interesting because we could vary it a little and say that literature is what most people think is literature. And actually I think that is the way it had worked for a while. Obviously, it is not a perfect definition, but it is an idea that came to my mind and actually it caught my attention.

Eagleton, T.  (1996). What is literature?. In Literary Theory (pp. 1-14). Oxford: Blackwell              publishing.