The nature of literature
1. Literature as the foregrounding of language Literariness is often said to lie above all in the organization of language that makes literature distinguishable from language used for other purposes. Literature is that foregrounds' language itself: language makes it strange, thrusts it at you-'Look! I'm language! so you can't forget that are dealing with language shaped in odd ways. In you particular, poetry organizes the sound plane of language so as to make it something to reckon with. Here is the beginning of a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins called 'Inversnaid:
This darksome burn, horseback brown.
His rollrock highroad roaring down.
In coop and in coomb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.
The foregrounding of linguistic patterning- the rhythmical repetition of sounds in burn brown... rollrock... road roaring -as well as the unusual verbal combinations such as"rollrock' make it clear that we are dealing with language organized to attract attention to the linguistic structures themselves.
But it is also true that in many cases readers don't notice linguistic patterning unless something is identified as literature. You don't listen when reading standard prose. The rhythm of this sentence. you will find. is scarcely one that strikes the reader's ear: but if a rhyme should suddenly appear, it makes the rhythm something that you hear. The rhyme, a conventional mark of literariness, makes you notice the rhythm that was there all along. When a text is framed as literature, we are disposed to attend to sound patterning or other sorts of linguistic organization we generally ignore.