literature

saint

theology

ology (the study of)

myth

religion

language

philology

linguistics

academic discipline

academics

economics

history

philosophy

politics

science

penguin

is a defense against the attacks of life. It says to life: You can't deceive me. I know your habits, foresee and enjoy watching all your reactions, and steal your secret by involving you in cunning obstructions that halt your normal flow.

Literature is a defense against the attacks of life. It says to life: You can't deceive me. I know your habits, foresee and enjoy watching all your reactions, and steal your secret by involving you in cunning obstructions that halt your normal flow. Cesare Pavese

is a disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.

Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions. (Iris Murdoch)

is a fantasy, no less absorbing for all its irrelevance. It is a parallel life, as dreams shadow waking but never intersect it.

I saw literature as a fantasy, no less absorbing for all its irrelevance a parallel life, as dreams shadow waking but never intersect it. Edmund White

is a form which provides us with the very attractive illusion that there is meaning in the world and that things connect.

I am always coming up with architectural metaphors when I think about writing. But I think one of the things that draw us to literature is that it gives us this very attractive illusion that there is meaning in the world things connect. Nicole Krauss

is a fragment of a fragment of all that ever happened, or has been said, and of this small fraction only a fraction still remains.

Literature is a fragment of a fragment. Of all that ever happened, or has been said, but a fraction has been written... and of this but little is extant. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

is a genre which plays a role in forming the reflexive consciousness essential for freedom.

For Sartre, literature's task was to light a spark of freedom in the reader.

Literature is a luxury... fiction is a necessity.

is a manifestation of a language which has no other law than that of affirming in opposition to all other forms of discourse its own precipitous existence.

Literature is a form of language that breaks with the whole definition of genres as forms adapted to an order of representations, and becomes merely a manifestation of a language which has no other law than that of affirming in opposition to all other forms of discourse its own precipitous existence. Michel Foucault

literature, n.Definitions

literature