Eagleton, ''Introduction: What is Literature?''

"The Formalists started out by seeing the literary work as a more or less arbitrary assemblage of 'devices', and only later came to see these devices as interrelated elements or 'functions' within a total textual system. 'Devices' including sound, imagery, rhythm, syntax, metre, rhyme, narrative techniques, in fact the whole stock of formal literary elements..." (Eagleton 3)

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/AngelaPalumbo/2009/01/the_formalities_of_formalism.html

I change, you change, we all change. Why shouldn’t literature?

“All literary works, in other words, are ‘rewritten’, if only unconsciously, by the societies which read them; indeed there is no reading of a work which is not also a ‘re-writing’”(Eagleton 11).
http://blogs.setonhill.edu/GretaCarroll/2009/01/mighty_mutability.html

Bad Literature? How dare them!

“We have still not discovered the secret, then, of why Lamb, Macaulay and Mill are literature but not, generally speaking, Bentham, Marx and Darwin. Perhaps the simple answer is that the first three are examples of ‘fine writing,’ whereas the last three are not. This answer has the disadvantage of being largely untrue, at least in my judgment, but it has the advantage of suggesting that by and large people term ‘literature’ writing which they think is good. An obvious objection to this is that if it were entirely true there would be no such thing as ‘bad literature.’” (Eagleton 9)

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/JennaMiller/2009/01/bad_literature_how_dare_them.html

Bad Literature? How dare them!

“We have still not discovered the secret, then, of why Lamb, Macaulay and Mill are literature but not, generally speaking, Bentham, Marx and Darwin. Perhaps the simple answer is that the first three are examples of ‘fine writing,’ whereas the last three are not. This answer has the disadvantage of being largely untrue, at least in my judgment, but it has the advantage of suggesting that by and large people term ‘literature’ writing which they think is good. An obvious objection to this is that if it were entirely true there would be no such thing as ‘bad literature.’” (Eagleton 9)

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/JennaMiller/2009/01/bad_literature_how_dare_them.html

"Literature is a 'special' kind of language, in contrast to the 'ordinary' language we commonly use" (Eagleton 4).
http://blogs.setonhill.edu/DerekTickle/2009/01/making_an_interview_a_success.html

Sometimes I wonder why professors or anybody for that matter bothers to ask what is literature.

Where's the truth?

Sorry, I can't get the URL to post. Hope this works...
http://blogs.setonhill.edu/EllenEinsporn/2009/01/wheres_the_truth.html

"We can begin, then, by raising the question: what is literature?" (Eagleton 1).

“If they decide that you are literature then it seems that you are, irrespective of what you thought you were.” -From Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory: An Introduction, “Introduction: What is Literature? page 8
http://blogs.setonhill.edu/EricaGearhart/2009/01/really_who_is_the_unidentified.html

“Gibbon no doubt thought that he was writing the historical truth, and so perhaps did the authors of genesis, but they are now read as fact by some and fiction by others;” (Eagleton 2)

"Some texts are born literary, some achieve literariness, and some have literariness thrust upon them."
http://blogs.setonhill.edu/BethanyMerryman/2009/01/what-makes-literature-literary.html

"Some texts are born literary, some achieve literariness, and some have literariness thrust upon them."

I don't think they worked the first time...

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/BethanyMerryman/2009/01/what-makes-literature-literary.html

"...It at least has the advantage of suggesting that 'literature' may be at least as much a question of what people do to writing as of what writing does to people."
http://blogs.setonhill.edu/BethanyBouchard/2009/01/dogs_must_be_carried_on_the_es.html

"The idea that there is a single 'normal' language, a common currency shared equally by members of a society, is an illusion. Any actual language consists of a highly complex range of discourses, differentiated according to class, region, gender, status and so on, which can by no means be neatly unified into a single homogeneous linguistic community." Terry Eagleton

"Literature is a 'special' kind of language, in contrast to the 'ordinary' language we commonly use"
http://blogs.setonhill.edu/CoreyStruss/2009/01/literature_as_a_special_langua.html