Language and Literature

Abstract

For reasons that seemed to me adequate at the time, I once tried to translate into Anglo-Saxon the regulations of a university department of English. I then made the salutary discovery that it was difficult to find an Anglo-Saxon word for ‘literature’ that did not also mean ‘language’. The supposed rift between language and literature is one about which much has been heard in universities during the last century, but today there are welcome signs that we are returning to a conception of literature in which language plays an important part. Language is used for a number of purposes, such as conversation, buying a bus ticket or making a will, that have nothing to do with literature, but literature without language is inconceivable. Such a view does not exalt the importance of language at the expense of literature. Painting without pigments is inconceivable, but we are in no doubt about the relative importance of painting and pigments; so far as the register of literature is concerned, language is the material of which literature is made. To the man in the street the picture is different.