[lbo-talk] Digression on "Lieterature" etc. was Does "Economics" have a Subject?

[Carrol Cox]

Prefatory. Suppose someone defined "bird" as a "creature with wings." Then
we have a subject including insects, bats, and eagles. Does that subject
exist? Can we ask useful or intelligible questions about it? Probably we
could go on for a long time discussing that subject, saying a lot of
interesting, even useful things. But I also think that ultimately if our
analysis was careful enough we would decide that, really, it did not exist.
Some of our statements about it might still prove useful in our new
division, but that would not justify the "reality" of our original category.

What I'm going to argue is that "works of art" and "literature" are both
such illusory categories. Defending them involves the same sort of
sufperficial analysis that would characterize the category of "creatures
with wings." They do not constitute definable realms of human activity about
which useful and powerful propositions may be formed. Pynchon's Gravity's
Rainbow and a freshman theme simply do not exhibit enough distinctive
properties to allow us to claim that one is literature and the other is not.
Neither does there exist any acceptable set of criteria by means of which
one can say that Beethoven's Second Symphony is a work of art and a wadded
up piece of paper is not. Hence neither "literature" nor "works of art"
constitute a definable object of a definable discipline.

Now there is a substantially new study, about which I was just beginning to
learn when my eyesight failed, which is a study of the book. That is clearly
as subdivision of historical writing, but it is clearly a defensible
sub-division as "literature" and "works of art" are not. It remains to be
seen whether the results of that study are interesting and/or useful
contributions to history, but I suspect that they will be, in the way that
the study of "literature" and of "works of art" as distinct realms have not
been.

Carrrol