In short: literature is not defined by a single property, but by the historical combination of form, language, fiction, reception and institution. This article presents the main criteria of literariness and its limits.

What do we understand by literature

Few questions have accompanied criticism with such persistence as the one that, apparently, should precede all the others: what turns a text into literature. The answer, however, has never been simple, because each attempt to isolate an exclusive property—fiction, style, linguistic deviation, form, narrativity, aesthetic function or the particular organization of discourse—ends up finding exceptions that force the initial definition to be revised, so that literary theory has been constructed less as the progressive conquest of a definitive formula than as a succession of models designed to illuminate different dimensions of a phenomenon especially resistant to any reduction.

From this difficulty arises Literary criticism articles. Volume II. Define the literary phenomenon, a work that brings together studies focused on some of the decisive issues in the theory of literature and modern narratology, although its purpose is not simply to summarize doctrines, but to show how some theories are born from the insufficiencies of others and how, behind apparently technical categories, intellectual problems of extraordinary depth are found.

One of those problems is time. Lessing had already shown, in Laocoon, that literature essentially belongs to the domain of succession, while subsequent narrative theory would discover that this succession is duplicated in two different temporalities: the time of events and the time of their discursive presentation. Tomachevski opened a decisive path by distinguishing between fable and plot, while Genette would take that intuition to one of the most rigorous analytical systems in narratology by studying the discordances between story and story through three major axes: order, duration and frequency.

Thanks to this distinction, it can be explained why a novel begins with the ending and then reconstructs its causes, how twenty years can be condensed into a single sentence or why an event that happened once can be told repeatedly from different perspectives. Narrative time then ceases to be identified with the calendar of fiction and appears as a true discursive architecture.

However, literary time cannot be reduced to simple formal engineering. Jean Pouillon had already insisted that the novel maintains a particularly intense relationship with temporality, while Paul Ricoeur will take the problem to its philosophical consequences by maintaining that time and narrative claim each other: time becomes properly human to the extent that it is narratively articulated, while the story reaches its full meaning to the extent that it configures the fundamental features of our temporal experience.

The contribution of Carmen Bobes Naves allows us to complete the panorama even more, because her semiological systematization does not marginalize lived time in favor of merely chronological time. An hour can last sixty minutes on the clock and yet become an eternity for those who wait, while entire years can subjectively contract until they acquire the consistency of a fleeting memory. Literature is especially suitable for representing this discordance between measurement and experience, since time can become a sign of waiting, memory, anguish, plenitude, repetition or loss.

Something similar happens with point of view. For a long time, different questions were confused under general categories such as first person, third person, omniscient narrator or subjective perspective, while the theories of Stanzel, Cohn, Lintvelt and Genette progressively showed that the speaker does not have to coincide with the perceiver, in the same way that belonging to the story does not necessarily determine the degree of knowledge from which it will be presented.

Genettian's famous distinction between voice and focalization made it possible to definitively separate these problems: one thing is to determine who narrates and what relationship they maintain with the story, while another is to establish from what consciousness or under what informational restrictions the reader accesses the narrated world. From this separation arises one of the most productive tools of modern narratology, because it allows us to explain why a third-person novel can be intimately linked to the consciousness of a character, while a first-person autobiography can retrospectively contemplate the past self from an enormous distance.

The interest of these theories does not belong only to the history of literary ideas. They continue to be extraordinarily effective instruments for reading. Knowing how to distinguish between history and discourse modifies our understanding of a novel; Recognizing an analepsis, an ellipsis or an iterative structure allows us to discover how the story regulates our experience of time, while identifying an internal focus or a displacement of the perspective center shows how knowledge, uncertainty and interpretation are distributed.

Therefore, defining the literary phenomenon does not mean enclosing it within a formula, but rather learning to recognize the mechanisms through which literature produces its specific effects. Each theory provides a partial perspective, while the comparison between them allows us to build a richer and less dogmatic understanding of the text.

That is the general purpose of this second volume of Literary criticism articles: to go through some of the great systems of modern criticism without turning them into immobile monuments, putting them in relation, confronting their concepts and showing how one theory leads to another, because the history of narratology is also the history of an uninterrupted search for precision.

From Lessing to Genette, from Tomachevski to Ricoeur, from Bobes to Cohn or Lintvelt, the same demand is finally repeated: to understand how a work transforms language into form, events into stories, duration into experience, and perspective into knowledge.

And perhaps it is precisely in this transformation that one of the fundamental keys to the literary phenomenon should be sought, more than in any closed definition.

This article provides the general framework. To delve deeper into the criteria of literariness and its debates, consult the second volume of Define the literary phenomenon.

What do we understand by literature

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