What, according to the author, is the only condition that must be met in order that the words of any author are termed as ‘literature’?
Directions: Read the following passage and answer the question that follows.
Comparative Literature is a young discipline at the universities and colleges of West Germany: chairs have only been established since the Second World War. For a long time the subject was rejected by historians of literature for reasons not unworthy of consideration, and still today there are representatives of the traditional literary-philosophical departments who consider it superfluous in the sphere of universitas litteratum. But the opposition to Comparative Studies has a paradoxical aspect: most established literature departments are in their very being themselves comparative. Even the names of separate disciplines indicate that literature as a whole, which the comparatists regard as one and indivisible, was only split up from considerations of expedience—a consequence of the fundamentally justified connection between language and literature, but also a carry-over of the dangerous and outmoded nationalistic assumptions of the 19th and 20th centuries on to the supernational phenomenon literature.
And the name too, ‘Comparative Literature’, is not very meaningful. It is modeled on the no happier French designation: ‘Litterature comparee’. We keep it simply because we have found no better, for ‘Literary Studies’ would be too vague, and ‘Study of World Literature’ too presumptuous. Yet almost inevitably it gives the impression that the aims of Comparative Literature are limited to comparing German with French literature. Such a proceeding would not promise much success: a general comparison between several national literatures would remain far too vague to produce scientifically relevant results, and a comparison between two authors would reveal more characteristics dividing them than they have in common. Mere parallels seem even more dubious, derived from similarities of structure. As individual creations, works of art are not comparable—and the comparatist knows this as well as anybody else. His goal is no different from that of the nationally defined literary disciplines: it consists of understanding the literary work of art, from as many sides as possible. The difference lies in the conception of literature itself and in the methods.
Although by ‘literature’ we usually mean the established work of art, nevertheless the words of any author who has been able to bring his subject into an appropriate form may claim to count as a work of art—not only poetry but prose as well, not only the drama but also the novel, not only the short story but also the essay, the philosophical tract, the biography, history, specialized writing, and so forth—but only when the form is appropriate to the content. Appropriateness is as hard to grasp as most aesthetic categories: it remains dependent on the critic’s taste, and thus to a certain degree subjective. On the other hand taste is to be formed on the models of the masters, and here lies the necessity for a canon of aesthetically exemplary ‘classical’ authors, established by the consensus of connoisseurs, although at the same time always subject to revision.
The classical author sets to taste in prose and verse the limits of the possible. To know these limits we read the classics—not only Horace’s odes, however, but also the Art of Poetry, not only Dante’s Commedia but also the Vita nuova and De Vulgari Eloquentia, not only Goethe’s poems, plays and novels, but also the scientific and critical prose, the letters and conversations. We extend the realm of the literary beyond linguistic boundaries, and at the same time beyond the boundaries of the merely fictitious, the strictly ‘imaginative’; but we also raise our qualitative demands through an aesthetic criterion, so as not to risk being suffocated under the mass of what has been written. The history of literature is no telephone book for us, in which the subscribers are all listed together, no General Assembly of the United Nations in which the voices of the Great Powers count for no more than those of the smallest political provinces; it is the liber aureus of the aesthetically successful and historically effective works of literature. Only this limitation, which of course does not exclude individual penetration in depth, makes the meaningful study of Comparative Literature possible.