Literature has been the acti of a cultural elite, and it has been what is sometimes called'cultural capital: learning about literature gives you a stake in culture that may pay off in various ways, helping you fit in with people of higher social status. But literature cannot be reduced to this conservative social function: it is scarcely the purveyor of family values' but makes seductive all manner of crimes, from Satan's revolt against God in Milton's Paradise Lost to Raskolnikov's murder of an old woman in Dostoevski's Crime and Punishment. It encourages resistance to capitalist values, to the practicalities of getting and spending. Literature is the noise of culture as well as its information. It is an entropic force as well as cultural capital. It is a writing that calls for a reading and engages readers in problems of meaning.