What Is Literary Writing? I . Distinguishing features o

What Is Literary Writing?
    Good morning, welcome to our writing class. Today we’d like to take a glimpse on literary writing. The term "literary writing" calls to mind works by writers such as Shakespeare, Milton or Wordsworth: definitive examples of all that the term implies. We instinctively associate the term with characteristics such as artistic merit, creative genius, and the expression of mankind’s noblest qualities. In this lecture I will explore some of the characteristics of this kind of writing.
     (1)Literary works are primarily distinguishable from other pieces of writing by their creative or artistic content.(2)A piece of literature differs from specialized treatises on astronomy, political economy, philosophy, or even history, in part because it appeals, not to a particular class of readers only, but to men and women: and in part because, while the object of the treatise is simply to impart knowledge, one ideal end of the piece of literature, whether it also imparts knowledge or not, is to yield aesthetic satisfaction by the manner of which it handles its theme.(3)In fundamental terms literature is an expression of life through the medium of " language" , but language used more profoundly than when used simply to convey information.
     (4)Literature is a vital record of what people have seen in life: what they have experienced of it, what they have thought and felt about those aspects of it which have the most immediate and enduring interest for all of us.(5)So literary writing, having creative and artistic content, is more carefully structured and uses words for the rhetorical effect of their flow, their sound, and their emotive and descriptive qualities.(6)Literary writers can also employ tone, rhyme, rhythm, irony, dialogue and its variations such as dialects and slang, and a host of other devices in the construction of a particular prose work, poem or play.
     (7)Literary writing is, in essence, a " response" ,(8)a subjective personal view which the writer expresses through his themes, ideas, thoughts, reminiscences, using his collection of words to try to evoke a response in his reader. It is not only a question of the artist looking into himself but also a question of his looking into others with the experience he has of himself. He writes with sympathy because he feels that the other man is like him.
     (9)Literature is a process of communication: it "helps us to understand life". Perhaps we should also consider the motivation of the writer as a factor which distinguishes literary from other forms of writing. The writer’s motivation is the energy that pulls together the strands of his creativity in the shaping of the finished work.(10)Personal motivation is an essential characteristic of literary writing. It is the engine behind creativity, some of the great themes not only in literary writing, but in all the arts: love, death, war, and peace, seem to provide permanent inspiration for artists. So perhaps an inventory of literary writers’ motives should include the overflowing of their passions, their desire for self-expression, an abiding fascination with humanity in all its variety, the need to come to grips with relationships as they really are in the world as it really is, the striving after an ideal world which can exist only in the imagination, and, perhaps at the heart of it all, the need to form, shape things of beauty.(11)The artist needs to resolve conflicts within himself, to reach an understanding, to search for some credible meaning of life, death, and everything. He is always reaching toward some sort of truth: an artistic creative truth, a truth that resides in the individual artist and needs to be grasped, made real, made understandable. Perhaps in some cases the artist’s motivation could be seen as a need to create other worlds, in order that they can project real conflicts onto another plane.
    The many different genres of the novel constitute a particular challenge to the concept of " literary writing".(12)Detective novels, and science fiction novels, for example, are creative, imaginative, depictions of life. We might question their seriousness as literature, or whether they can achieve the high ideals of art, but then we might equally well question the meaning of " seriousness" , and " the high ideals of art". Popular novels may not deal with life’s great conflicts, or search for truth and beauty, and they may deal with the dark side of life, or escape into the fantastic, but can they still be considered "literature"? Do they still make an important contribution to our understanding of the world, as "real" literature does? Obviously "literary" works take an event, an aspect of life as a nucleus and construct a world around that core. They are works about real people, engaged in the real business of living. They convey knowledge, understanding, experience and are hence considered important. Yet they have in common with the detective and science fiction novels that they are books, consisting of words that have been used to express something, words that may or may not be read, and may or may not succeed in conveying an understanding of the world they depict. In my view it comes down to subjective value judgments. I believe literature is a "broad church" which ought to be able to deal with any subject,(13)and that ultimately it is individual reader, or readers all together, who decide on the value of any particular work and on whether or not it deserves a place in the annals of literary history. Writers aim to show us " the world" , but no single writer can do this, and " literature" should encompass numerous different kinds of writers because each is trying to show us something which cannot be shown as a whole. Each can only give us his own small fragment of understanding. Ultimately it is those works which endure that should be considered " literature" , those which have succeeded in holding firm a fragment of life, to be seen, to be read, to be understood. Perhaps we should let a writer have the last word on summing up the writers’ art:(14)The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed, so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move.
    In conclusion, literary writing does embody certain distinguishing characteristics.(15)It is a self-conscious, imaginative mode of writing which uses words not just to convey information, but as an art form. Ultimately it is a response to life. This is the end of the lecture. Thank you very much!