A Particular Use of Words

Abstract

The fact is, there is something special about literary texts. Not necessarily something specially good: bad novels, bad poems, are commoner than good ones. The fact remains that reading a novel or a poem (any novel, any poem that works — however imperfectly — as a novel or a poem) is a different kind of experience from reading other texts (a news item in the paper, an article in an encyclopaedia, the minutes of a meeting). Reading a novel or a poem gets you involved in a particular use of words.