The paradox of literature Literature is a paradoxical institution because to create literature is to write according to existing formulas to produce something that looks like a sonnet or that follows the conventions of the novel but it is also to flout those conventions, to go beyond them. Literature is an institution that lives by exposing and criticizing its own limits, by testing what will happen if one writes differently So literature is at the same time the name for the utterly conventional- moon rhymes with June and swoon, maidens are fair, knights are bold-and for the utterly disruptive, where readers have to struggle to create any meaning at all. as in sentences like this from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake: Eins within a space and a wearywide space it was er wohned a Mookse. The question what is literature?' arises, l suggested earlier, not because