What is Literature?

I know that there are a number of answers to the question, “What is literature?” To wit: (1) it is anything written, (2) it is writing that is deemed to be superior in quality and of lasting value, (3) it is whatever you think it is, and (4) no one really knows because it is one of those unanswerable questions.

Rebecca Walkowitz in this week’s article goes by definition number 3 and approaches it as anything that involves words. I think she’s right about world literature being redefined by globalization but I wonder about the choice she made in deciding to do some close reading of the material produced by Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries.

The people behind the website describe themselves as artists and they produce something that to me seems to be more performance art than literature. Flashing words at the viewer, even if the words do form sentences eventually, is not literature in my book. I’m not saying it has no value; I found it all very interesting but after the fourth chapter(??) I could “read” no more because I was afraid I might have a seizure and that would be especially upsetting as I am not normally prone to seizures. It seems to me that the Chang-Voge work is the kind that belongs on the fourth floor at MOMA along with the artwork featuring a record player scratching along on an album or with the artwork of mirrors sticking up willy-nilly out of globs of what looks like dryer lint or with the white wall with black letters that say “A WALL PITTED BY A SINGLE AIR RIFLE SHOT” (the museum explains that they decided against actually shooting the wall so they settled on just writing the explanation of what the artist did). I like all kinds of art even though some of the more outlandish stuff on the fourth floor is beyond my ken.

So, when Walkowitz tries to do some close reading of the new type of world literature I wonder why she chose the Chang-Voge stuff. Was it the most outrageous example of “literature” she could find? I know that someday there will be only electronic stuff to read and that the Chang-Voge work is apparently “distinctive,” but I wonder how typical that style will become as opposed to stories that will be “born-digital” and “born-translated” but won’t be flashed at the reader.

I get her point about how the definition of world literature is changing in so many ways (translated immediately, available immediately, etc.), but I’m not sure what these new close-reading strategies are that she concludes are needed in the “Age of Global Writing.” I question whether the “writing” that Chang and Voge do can even be classified as writing and how representative it is of storytelling in our increasingly digital world. Does this mean that “A WALL PITTED BY A SINGLE AIR RIFLE SHOT” is literature too?

P.S. (Apparently I am rather thick because I don't really see any new close reading strategies outlined in her article, which she delivered to audiences all over the country. As I am doing the presentation on this reading, I will read this a few more times so perhaps by Thursday I will figure out the strategies. Nevertheless, I will still question the definition of "literature."