Читать книгу Analytisch orientierte Literaturwissenschaft - Rolf Breuer - Страница 6

This essay focuses on the various ways in which literature has been differentiated from non-literature. The criteria of differentiation show themselves to be quite heterogeneous, even incommensurable. Older – essentialist – theories, based on epic and lyric poetry, distinguished between poetic and non-poetic forms of language. Later – relational – theories, often based on the novel, have argued that it is the reference of language to reality that distinguishes fiction from non-fiction. Still more recent theories, accompanied by new forms of literature, see the difference in the eye of the beholder or, rather, reader – and this is a pragmatic criterion of differentiation. Since each perspective yields valuable insights, the question is how the three criteria – essentialist, relational and pragmatic – relate to one another.