Untitled - witz cultural

293RECONFIGURINGLITERARYEDUCATIONmost important factor of which is simply that it is looked at in a certain way:taken as a work of art, it is contemplated aesthetically, regarded as the occasionfor aesthetic pleasure or, possibly, for aesthetic outrage. It enters, onemight say, the canon of art; and the contemporary existence in the Westernworld of galleries permits it to inhabit, for a time, a physical space that istaken by the acculturated to signify, "l am a work of art. I'm not (simply) anobject for holding open a door. Look at me carefullyl' If that object is sold,bartered, or given as qu)ork of artto one who recognizes the game or accedesin the demand to play her or his role in it, then it brings with it the capacityto generate that special space around it that signals it to be an object of specialnotice and a special way of noticing.In precisely the same way, calling something a work of literature invokesa congeries of social, political, economic, and educational practices. If onestates that a particular text is a work of literature, then for one it is, and onereads it and relates it to other texts in certain definite ways. As Terry Eagletoncorrectly observes, "anything can be literature, and anything which is regardedas unalterably and unquestionably literature-Shakespeare, for example-cancease to be literature. Any belief that the study of literature is thestudy of a stable, well-definable entity, as entomology is the study of insects,can be abandoned as a chimera . . . Literature, in the sense of a set of worksof assured and unalterable value, distinguished by certain shared inherentproperties, does not exist" (Literary Theory, 10-11). The concept of literature(or literariness) therefore provides the fundamental and most extended formof canonization, and classifying a text as a work of literature is a matter ofsocial and political practice.I first became aware of the implications of this fact a bit more than severaldecades ago when I was reading the sermons of the Evangelical Anglican, Henry Melvill, in an attempt to understand Victorian hermeneutic practice.Upon encountering works by a man who was the favorite preacher of|ohn Ruskin, Robert Browning, W. E. Gladstone, and many of their contemporaries,I realized that his sernons shared literary qualities found in writingsby Ruskin, Carlyle, Arnold, and Newman. At first Melvill interested mesolely as an influence on Ruskin and as a means of charting the sage's changingreligious beliefs. In several studies I drew upon his extraordinarily popularsermons as extraliterary sources or as indications of standardVictorian interpretativepractice. If I were to write my study of Ruskin now three decadeslater, I would treat Melvill's sermons also as works of literature, in part becausecontemporaries did so and in part because classifying them as literaturewould foreground certain intertextual relations that might otherwise remain