What is literature
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What is literature?
Terry Eagleton thinks that literature cant be simply defined as an objective, descriptive category, nor what people would like to call literature. The value judgment of literature deeply roots in the structure of social ideologies. They refer to modes of feeling, valuing, perceiving and believing which have some kind of relation to the maintenance and reproduction of social power. I agree to these viewpoints.
First, literature cannot have the same kind of cognitive function as science: its statements are generalized, not specific enough to be verified experimentally. For example, poems, its hard to tell whether they are about an outer reality which the poet is witnessing, or descriptions of his own feelings, wishes and fears, stimulated by the world outside. This is why literature cant be easily said objective or subjective.
Second, literature is not personal taste. Since everyone is a member of a particular society, hes involved in, as Terry Eagleton says, certain deep ways of seeing and valuing which are bound up with [his] social life...