If you, the reader, have wondered, “Literature-what is it?” and would like a succinct answer, but still correct and scholarly, then you have come to the right text. So, in this article I will briefly review what literature is, and discuss its two main forms, oral and written.
The Academic Dictionary, compiled by the Russian Academy of Sciences, defines literature as “the totality of scientific, artistic, philosophical and similar works.” The disadvantage of this definition is that under the subject matter one can see non-literary things, such as graphic illustrations. I can offer my own definition, more appropriate to the article: literature (Latin litteratura – written) is a set of speech constructions captured in oral and written form. Literature is the object of study of literary studies (for more details see the article “Fundamentals of Literary Theory”). Literature is both a special human activity and also the product of this activity, where the main tool by means of which the creation of products takes place is language and its unit – the word.
At first glance, we could stop at the definitions and a brief explanation, but there is a significant “but”, the average man often perceives a literary work as recorded only in writing, but in fact there is a form of oral literature, to a story about which I will proceed.
Oral Literature
First of all, yes, there is oral literature and even with the advent of writing it has not disappeared. And if we consider the period when mankind, having become a community of sentient beings, albeit scattered, began to shape its culture, but had no written language, then oral literature is an important tool for communicating the products created. The latter without writing is particularly important, for while the author, having created a literary work captured in written form, could no longer make any special effort to preserve it (with certain assumptions, of course), the product in oral literary form required a number of additional efforts from him, for example:
To remember accurately what he created. After all, it is not enough to invent something; it is important to retain it accurately in memory in order to reproduce it faithfully, as originally conceived, in oral form. Yes, it is often for his benefit to constantly rethink what he has created, but there are cases when, on the contrary, it is to his detriment, but these are unnecessary consequences to consider here;
To independently communicate what has been created to others. If the reader could independently study the product of written literature, then with the oral form the author had to transfer his work to someone else, to present it in direct contact orally, to put it simply – to tell, to narrate;
Difficulties of multistage transmission. In case the author managed to reproduce exactly what he thought up, he had to be concerned about how the listener understood what he heard, how well he remembered it and whether he could in turn reproduce it correctly (part of the problem from point one).
In sum, the oral form of transmitting and preserving information is far from the best tool for cultural development. However, it is difficult to overestimate the influence and role of oral literature on the formation and development of culture, both of individual social groups and peoples, or even of all of humankind. Moreover, the oral form persists to this day and will apparently not disappear in the near future, because man retains both the need for verbal communication and the fact that in a number of situations it is more convenient to use the oral form than to write each other’s essays. Only it should be made clear that oral communication itself is not literature if it does not create and preserve a certain speech construction for later reproduction. For example, if two people are discussing how clear the sky is today and the bus is seven minutes late, it is not literature. If during oral communication the constructions that fit the criteria of a literary work (for example, an anecdote is composed or a poem is recited to fit the situation) are created, transmitted (by the narrator) or reproduced, then yes, this is oral literature.
It is clear that this topic is covered briefly and is much deeper, but for such a study it should be referred to studies of the appropriate size, and I will move on to the written form of literature.
Written Literature
It is not difficult to guess that written literature was made possible by writing, and the more effective the latter became, the better the products of literature became. Yes, the development of writing did not take place immediately; it was a very long process, which took several thousand years and was essentially due to the fact that mankind had a constant need to make the products of its mental labor timeless, that is, to write them down, preferably in detail and in detail. This is how the ingenious representatives of mankind perfected this much needed tool, including its graphemes: from pictography through hieroglyphs to alphabetic writing.
Written literature provided an opportunity not only to preserve works in their exact form, but also made it possible to easily reproduce what was preserved, it gradually reduced the complexity of interpretation, for example, it is one thing to understand the semantic meaning of a message in drawings and have to guess, and another when it is composed in syllabic or alphabetic writing. Nowadays, every civilized person can master the written component of their language and create literary works; and yes, not only essays or novels are literary products, but also short letters or even notes or messages transmitted by “short message service”(SMS).
I hope that from the article it became clear what it is – literature, and that the latter has not only written but also oral form, and how each of them is useful and simply necessary for modern man, regardless of his professional, leisure or educational activities. And I also hope that you, the reader, will be able to distinguish independently in oral speech the creation or presentation of a literary product from that which is not.