Complete the account of the category.
Around 1400 "literature" named a quality of the ______, and by about 1800 it named a class of ______. Eagleton concludes that literature is not an ______ category but a ______ one.
Word bank: reader · texts · ontological · functional · author · aesthetic
Hints
- The first pair contrasts a person with a shelf.
- Ontological asks what a thing is; the alternative asks what is done with it.
Show the answer
Around 1400 "literature" named a quality of the reader, and by about 1800 it named a class of texts. Eagleton concludes that literature is not an ontological category but a functional one.
The four blanks contain the whole argument of the lesson: a category that moved from describing people to describing books, and a definition that survives only by describing use rather than essence.
Practise Literary Study Among the Disciplines
The app has 3 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Literature I is free to start.
More questions on Literary Study Among the Disciplines
- Eagleton argues literature is a functional rather than an ontological category. What follows from that claim?
- For roughly ninety-five per cent of the time humans have had language, there was no writing.
- Sort each claim by whether it belongs to the OLD sense of "literature" (learning in general) or the MODERN…
- Arrange the media of literary transmission in historical order.
- Milman Parry argued that Homeric epithets such as "swift-footed Achilles" are metrical building blocks. If a…
- Match each writer to the argument they made about the category of literature.
- Raymond Williams shows that the modern sense of 'literature' narrowed to imaginative art around 1800. What…
- Print culture made the author's name more commercially important than manuscript culture had.