What Is Literature?

Abstract

This short lecture was originally published in What Is Literature: Twenty-Two Lectures on Common Senses of Literature (Shenme shi wenxue: Wenxue changshi ershier jiang). A wide-ranging, ambitious, but ultimately plainspoken and practical attempt to define literature, it was written by one of the postsocialist era’s most prolific and restless thinkers. Taking incitement from two very different Chinese authors—Mo Yan and Gao Xingjian—Liu Zaifu uses the sweep and inclusivity of their work to criticize traditional definitions of literature from ancient China, the Tang Dynasty, modern Europe, the May Fourth Movement, and socialist China. Each of these definitions is examined and then rejected as too limited or partial, unable to hold the explorations and experimentations of later writers. Liu’s survey ends in essaying his own definition for literature: Literature is the form of the aesthetic existence of a free soul.