“What is Literature?”

As I begin to write lessons for the Covenantal Literature curriculum, I keep returning to the question, “What is literature?”

It’s a subject of immense importance for a Christian understanding of literature. Is “literature” merely imaginative or fictional writing? If we say that the Bible is “literature,” what are we saying about its content?

In his book on biblical literature, critic Robert Alter asks these three questions:

In what sense can we, with our fundamentally secular assumptions about literary expression, speak of the Bible as literature?

If literature involves a powerful component of imaginative free play, can there be any real place for so anarchic, perhaps even subversive, an impulse in a body of texts as spiritually intent and as ideologically freighted as the Bible?

Is there any discernible methodological priority or complementarity between a literary approach and historical or text-critical approaches to the Bible?

Robert Alter, The World of Biblical Literature

Notice that Alter admits bringing “secular assumptions” to the text.

Such assumptions are ultimately self-defeating and explain why literature as an academic discipline has floundered. As an academic discipline, literature was meant to provide some coherent way of approaching symbols and types after the discrediting of the Bible. The move to consider the “Bible as literature” is just an extension of this bait-and-switch.

The Bible is literature, of course, and must inform how we define and study literature. If the Bible does not oppose “literary” writing with non-fiction, then we must not either.

There is much here to investigate.