we find ourselves back at the key question. What is literature?', which will not go away. But what sort of question is it? If a 5-year-old is asking. it's easy. Literature, you answer is stories, poems, and plays. But if the questioner is a literary theorist, it's harder to know how to take the query. It might be a question about the general nature of this object, literature. which both of you already know well. What sort of object or activity is it? What does it do? What purposes does it serve? Thus understood, what is literature?' asks not for a definition but for an analysis, even an argument about why one might concern oneself with literature at all.