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Literature is one of those words with which we have a good relationship and which are part of our lives, our daily lives. It is impossible to think of literature and not think of a book, another old acquaintance of ours. However, when we are asked to define what literature is, we are at a loss for words. Just the words, the soul of literary art.
Literature according to dictionary
Aristotle - literary art is imitation
The oldest definition used by literature theorists is the one constructed by Aristotle (384 - 322 BC). For the Greek philosopher, literary art is mimesis (imitation); it is the art that imitates by the word. That is, imitating reality is part of literature and men like it.
Literature is the art of the written word, and it is from it that it originates, from littera, letter in Latin. Here it is worth noting that the word is not always written. In Ancient Greece, stories like The Iliad and Odyssey were passed down verbally from generation to generation until they were transcribed by the historian Homer and reached our days in book format.
Other literature definitions
Literature is also one of the artistic manifestations of the human being, such as music, dance, theater, sculpture, architecture and others. While paints are the painter's raw material, words are the writer's raw material. For this, it demands a set of skills to read and write correctly.
It can also be the career of letters or a set of literary works from a country or an era. Literature, as well as the language it uses, is a communication and action mechanism whose role is to transmit the knowledge and culture of a community at a given time.
Finally, we can say that literature is every manifestation of language that has aesthetic expression as one of its purposes. It is a speech that does not only intend to communicate something, but also to build a narrative that is beautiful or engaging, sensitive and humanly profound.
Literary and non-literary text
The literary text is narrative and poetic. Most of the time the language is connotative, that is, the words are used not in the literal sense but in the figurative sense. The literary text is subjective, has an aesthetic character and not just a linguistic one, whose interpretation is up to the reader.
That woman is a snake.
The informative text has the objective of transmitting information and does not have the same narrative and artistic elements of the literary text. The writing is objective and denotative so that the reader understands the literal meaning of the words and has no doubts about the text.
Snakes are reptiles with a long, slender bodies.
When you read a newspaper, a book on medicine or English grammar, you know you are not looking at a literary text because the information is unified for all readers and not subject to different interpretations.
Literature and history always go together
It is important to bear in mind that the different Literary Schools or Literary Movements reflect the historical moments that characterize each one of them. The historical and social changes in post-Modernism (1945) are processed in increasingly shorter periods due to technological advances.
In my novel Sina maldita (Damn Fate), the story unfolds from 1964 to 2016. The changes that took place during this period would be unthinkable for the society of the second half of the 20th century. How, three decades ago, would it be possible to imagine life with smartphones, 4K televisions, blog, blockchain, NFT metaverse and cryptocurrencies?
In less than 40 years of writing, I jumped from the pen to the typewriter, to the computer, to the notebook and I even use the smartphone to write; in fact, it is no longer necessary to type, I speak and the notebook writes. In each of these stages there was an evolution in my interpretation of the world as a writer, tremendously fast compared to previous periods.
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