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Literature is a significant achievement of humanity that connects different times, philosophies, outlooks on life, and ideas. There are many different genres and styles, and each has its own characteristics. Moreover, there is the form of interaction with literature as a way of expressing ideas based on works, namely literary criticism. The canon is an important literary aspect that characterizes ways different dimensions of literature are similar or different. The aim of this paper is to summarize the main points of literature and literary studies. In this regard, one should analyze such concepts as literature canons, literature genres, literariness, and different approaches to literariness.
Canon is a multidimensional aspect of literature, which helps one to determine the main characteristics of congeniality and distinctions in audience perception approaches. Thus, one distinguishes several basic canon types, namely accessible canon, selective and official canon, personal canon, and critical canon, and later approaches involve pedagogical, diachronic, and nonce canons (Universidad de Jaén, 2021a). It is important to remember that the canon is in constant development. Thus, accessible canon includes all the text available for the audience in a certain period of history. The selective canon involves the list of the authors, which one may find in libraries, bookshops, and studies, while the official canon is a combination of all possible selective canons. Personal canon formulates the personal opinion on certain work or author, accordingly, critical canon means authors are most frequently approached by the experts.
Texts, which are popular for a short period of time, constitute nonce canon, and text most commonly studied in teaching institutions formulate a pedagogical canon. Finally, the diachronic canon includes texts most frequently included in all previous canons for an extended period of time (Universidad de Jaén, 2021a). Additionally, one should comprehend that literariness is whatever gives a text a literary relevance, namely, what makes the text a literary one. Further, nowadays, one may distinguish three main literary genres, namely narrative, drama, and poetry (Universidad de Jaén, 2021b). In any case, the main characteristic of the literary text would be how it connects past and present, making sense of relevance (Shohet, 2018). However, researches determine one more literary genre, namely non-fiction, and some subgenres.
Talking about a narrative, one should remember that the point of view and a narrator formulate two basic aspects of this genre. The foundation of an idea of a story, generally, is an ideological point of view. There can be a first-person narrator, thus, the audience has access to the characters mental processes, and the perception of the environment is occurring through the heros eyes and ears, or a third-person narrator. Considering a drama, one should distinguish naturalistic drama, which has life as its main source of reference, and non-naturalistic. The second kind of drama may represent elements that do not imitate life, thus, it has more freedom and possibilities to choose the form of an idea representation. Many contemporary poetic writers take the fragmentary nature for granted, an innovation from the Romantic movement (Hetherington & Atherton, 2020). One of the basic poetic discourses is a visual representation of the text (generally, on paper or on the screen).
Furthermore, it is essential to analyze the definition of the term literariness. As mentioned above, literariness is whatever helps one realize whether the work is literary or non-literary. The literariness can be understood as a scale, which begins with zero degrees of literariness (conversational storytelling) and to high literature (Wagner, 2020). There are several approaches to literariness, and one should determine three main of these, namely focusing on the origin, the product, and the goal (Universidad de Jaén, 2021b). The first approach is traditional since it involves dealing with the authors environment, society, and the main creative tendencies of that time. Thus, its main foundation is formulating by analyzing all the circumstances affecting the authors work.
The approach to literariness focusing on the product (the text) constitutes analyzing the language as the main way of the authors and the audiences interconnection. Language is also the main instrument to transmit ideas, events, and situations. In this regard, one should remember that defamiliarisation, as one of the important tools in the current approach, is a process of making the familiar things to readers unfamiliar. The reason lies in a writers desire to make the literature salient. Foregrounding is established when we find either an excessive regularity or an excessive irregularity in linguistic form (Universidad de Jaén, 2021b). The approaches focusing on the goal formulate readers being central in literary terms. The first theory describing such a principle is Mikhail Bakhtins Dialogism, and the main idea is the audience being the basic element of the literary process. This approach stresses the instability and openness of the text, seeing polyphony and dialogue as literary values.
References
Hetherington, P., & Atherton, C. (2020). Prose poetry: an introduction. Princeton University Press.
Shohet, L. (2018). Temporality, genre, and experience in the age of Shakespeare: Forms of time. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Universidad de Jaén. (2021a). Dealing with creative texts in English: literary and non-literary genres. Platea (UJA). Web.
Universidad de Jaén. (2021b). Different approaches to literature in English: between the traditional and the avant-garde. Platea (UJA). Web.
Wagner, E. (2020). Narrativity, coherence, and literariness: A theoretical approach with analyses of Laclos, Kafka, and Toussaint. Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG.
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