SELEC REFERENCIA Este grupo define:

that it is language used in a way that is aesthetically pleasing, that calls

attention to itself as medium. Todorov attacks modern theorists, such

as Rene Wellek and Northrop Frye, for sliding covertly between these

two positions, because, he says, there is no necessary link between

them and neither can be a satisfactory criterion for literature alone. I

shall argue that there is a necessary connection, but it is certainly true

that neither definition can stand alone. For, to take the first one, there is

literature which is not fiction (e.g. biography) and fiction which is not

literature (e.g. advertising in narrative form). Another difficulty with

this definition of literature is that the concept of'fiction' has to be

stretched somewhat to cover propositions as well as descriptions, since a

good deal of literature (e.g. lyrical and didactic poetry) consists of the

former rather than the latter. Recent efforts to apply the speech-act

philosophy of J. L. Austin to the theory of literature have enhanced our understanding of what is involved in fictional or mimetic ut- terance, but have not been able to explain how writing that is factual by intention can acquire the status of literature.4 _{It would seem that we}

can identify literature with fiction only in the weak, negative sense that in the literary text, descriptions and propositions need not be put forward or accepted as 'true'.

The other type of definition, literature as language used in a way that is aesthetically pleasing, language that calls attention to itself as medium, has its roots in classical rhetoric, but persists into modern formalist criticism. At its most simple, this theory associates literature with a mere abundance of tropes and figures, and as such is easily refuted. Ruqaiya Hasan, another recent investigator of the problem, observes: 'it is highly doubtful if the frequency of such recognized devices in longer prose works is significantly different from that in, say, a feature article in a quality newspaper.'5 _{Nor have the attempts of}

English and American 'New Critics' to identify literariness with one particular rhetorical device—metaphor, irony, paradox, ambiguity— been conspicuously successful. A more promising approach is the argument of the Czech school of structuralists that literary discourse is characterized by consistent and systematic foregrounding.

'Foregrounding' is the accepted English translation of the Czech word aktualisace, which was the central concept of the school of linguistics and poetics that flourished in Prague in the 1930s (to which Roman Jakobson belonged after he left Russia and before he moved to America). In this school of thought, the aesthetic is opposed to the utilitarian. Any item in discourse that attracts attention to itself for what it is, rather than acting merely as a vehicle for information, is foregrounded. Foregrounding depends upon a 'background' of 'automatized' components—that is, language used in customary and predictable ways so that it does not attract attention. Foregrounding was defined by Jan Mukaf ovsky, the most distinguished of the Czech theorists, as 'the aesthetically intentional distortion of linguistic components'.6 _{It is not peculiar to literature—the use of puns in casual}

conversation is an example of foregrounding; nor does it imply a single linguistic norm, for what is automatized in one kind of discourse will become foregrounded when transferred to another (for example, the use of a technical term in casual conversation). It is not the statistical frequency of foregrounded components that distinguishes literary discourse from nonliterary discourse, but the consistency and systematic character of the foregrounding and the fact that the background as well as the foreground, and the relationships between them, are aesthetically relevant, whereas in nonliterary discourse only the foregrounded components are aesthetically relevant. Furthermore the 'background' of literary discourse is dual: ordinary language ('the norm of the standard language') and the relevant literary tradition.7

What is Literature? 3 To this may be added a third type of background: the linguistic norms established by the work itself. Thus, for example, T. S. Eliot's 'Sweeney Among the Nightingales' is foregrounded, first, as poetry against the background of the norms of the standard language, by the presence of metre and rhyme and certain archaic and literary lexical items such as 'the horned gate', 'Gloomy Orion', etc. Secondly it is foregrounded as a 'modern' poem against the background of the norms of nineteenth-century English lyric poetry by the inclusion of low subject matter and low diction:

Gloomy Orion and the Dog

Are veiled; and hushed the shrunken seas; The person in the Spanish cape

Tries to sit on Sweeney's knees

and by the absence of explanatory links between the various events reported in the poem. And thirdly, the last stanza,

And sang within the bloody wood When Agamemnon cried aloud, And let their liquid siftings fall To stain the stiff dishonoured shroud

is foregrounded against the background of the rest of the poem by the absence of poetic indecorum and by the switch of tense from present to past. At first we are struck by the contrast between the sordid present and the dignified, harmoniously beautiful mythical past to which we are swept by the emphatic 'sang'; then perhaps we recognize that 'liquid siftings' is not after all a metaphor for birdsong but a euphemism for bird-droppings, that the nightingales (representing the natural and aesthetic orders) are as indifferent to Agamemnon as to Sweeney, and that there is not all that much to choose between the two in terms of making a good death. It will be noted that what is foregrounded at one level becomes background at the next.

In the poetics of the Prague school, foregrounding defined in this way is a sufficient criterion of literariness, but Hasan thinks literary foregrounding requires some 'motivation' to explain it. This she finds in the 'unity' of literary texts, a unity of topic or theme that regulates the development of the discourse without being literally present in it:

In literature there are two levels of symbolization: the categories of the code of the language are used to symbolize a set of situations, events, processes, entities, etc. (as they are in the use of language in general); these situations, events, entities, etc., in their turn, are used to symbolize a theme or a theme constellation. I would suggest that we have here an essential characteristic of literary verbal structures. . . . So far as its own nature is concerned, the theme (or regulative principle) of a literary work may be seen as a generalization or an abstraction, as such being closely related to all forms of hypothesis-building. A certain set of situations, a configuration of events, etc. is seen not only as itself (i.e. a particular happening) but also as a manifestation of some deep underlying principle.8

This, as Hasan acknowledges, has much in common with Aristotle's definition of the poetic as expressing the universal in the particular. Aristotle, however, equates literature with fiction, to the exclusion of history and philosophy, and so, by implication, does Hasan's theory. It is not immediately obvious how it would, for instance, explain why Boswell's Life of Johnson and Pope's Essay on Man can be, and are, read as literature, since in these texts there seems to be no second level of symbolization, no second-order theme: Boswell is concerned only with the particular, Pope directly with the universal, and the language of the texts refers us immediately to these regulating themes or topics—Johnson in one case, man's place in the universe in the other. One could get round this difficulty only by saying that Boswell's Life is really about the nature of genius, or about the problems of writing biography; that the Essay on Man is really about the terror of the Augustan mind in the face of scepticism or about the problems of fitting philosophical statements into rhyming couplets—finding the regulative principle of the discourse in this kind of motivation. Certainly it is one of the characteristics of a 'literary' reading that we ask what a text is 'about' with the implication that the answer will not be self-evident. We do not merely decode the literary message—we interpret it, and may get out of it more information than the sender was conscious of putting into it. Unfortunately (for the purpose of defining literature) all discourse is open to the same kind of interpretation, as a lot of recent work in linguistics and cultural studies has shown. Roland Barthes's Mythologies (Paris, 1957) is a good example of how a second level of symbolization in Hasan's sense can be discovered in journalism, advertising and indeed non-verbal spectacles such as striptease and wrestling.

All one can say to reinforce Hasan's theory is that the literary text invites this kind of interpretation, and indeed requires it for its completion, whereas the nonliterary text does not invite it, and is in effect destroyed by it. When Barthes, for example, analyses the contrasting rhetorical strategies used in advertisements for cleaning fluids and detergents ('The implicit legend of [chlorinated fluid] rests on the idea of a violent, abrasive modification of matter; the connotations are of a chemical or mutilating type: the product "kills" the dirt. Powders, on the contrary, are separating agents: their ideal role is to liberate the object from its circumstantial imperfection: dirt is "forced out" and no longer killed . . ,'9_{) he renders them impotent:}

what has been offered as reality is exposed as (in the derogatory sense) a myth. To interpret Robinson Crusoe as a myth of bourgeois individualism, however, (as Ian Watt has plausibly done)10 _{in no way}

destroys the power of that story to excite and engage us on the realistic level but explains and enhances it; myth here is used in the honorific sense of a useful fiction, the narrative equivalent of a non-verifiable, non-falsifiable yet valid hypothesis.

What is Literature^ 5 We come back to the problem of showing that there is a necessary connection between the fictional and rhetorical definitions of literature. Mukafovsky was very insistent that 'the question of truthfulness does not apply in regard to the subject matter of a work of poetry, nor does it even make sense . . . the question has no bearing on the aesthetic value of the work; it can only serve to determine the extent to which the work has documentary value'.11 _{The referential}

dimension of works of literature is regarded by the Prague school as merely a 'semantic component' to be considered by the critic strictly in terms of its structural relationships with other components. The regularizing principle which Hasan looked for in theme or topic is, in their theory, the dominant—the component 'which sets in motion, and gives direction to, the relationship of all the other components'.12 _And

since literature is not about the real world it must be about itself: In poetic language foregrounding achieves maximum intensity to the extent of pushing communication into the background as the objective of expression and of being used for its own sake; it is not used in the services of communication, but in order to place in the foreground the act of expression, the act of speech itself.13

A more celebrated and concise formulation of this principle is Roman