Properties versus consequences
In each of these five cases we the structure I mentioned encounter above: we are dealing with what might be described as properties of literary worls features that mark them as literature, but with what could also be seen as the results of a particular kind of attention. a function that we accord language in considering it literature. Neither as perspective, it seems, can englobe the other to become the comprehensive perspective. The qualities of literature can't be reduced either to objective properties or to consequences of of framing ways language. There is one key reason for this which already emerged from the little thought-experiments at the beginning of this chapter. Language resists the frames we impose. It is hard to make the couplet We dance round in a ring..." into fortune-cookie fortune or Stir a vigorously into a stirring poem. When we treat something as literature. when we look for pattern and coherence, there is resistance in the language: we have to work on it, work with it. Finally, the literariness of E literature may lie in the tension of the interaction between the linguistic material and readers' conventional expectations of what literature is. But I say this with caution, for the other thing have learned from our we j five cases is that each quality identified as an important feature of literature turns out not to be a defining feature, since it can be found at work in other language uses.