Oct 30, 2008
On the Nature of the Literary
Charles Hartman (author of Virtual Muse: Experiments in Computer Poetry [1996]) defines the literary as that which is “insistently linguistically interesting.”
That’s pretty interesting; from there, it’s a relatively short (though perhaps cognitively large?) leap to making arguments for the literariness of digital spam or other “autopoetic” texts. Making the literary contingent upon language—rather than, say, cultural content, “timelessness,” or the like—is, I think, the right way to begin a conversation about where literature comes from and some positive options for the poet in an age that cares increasingly less about traditional poetic production.
In the past, I’ve been hard pressed to offer a reasonable definition for what makes something literary. Of course, one problem with Hartman’s definition is its obvious recursivity—if we agree with him, we immediately run into the problem of what makes something “interesting,” and we’re stuck with the obscenity problem (i.e., “I know it when I see it”) again. But centering definitions of the literary around both language and the concept of interest still, I think, gets us somewhere.