Introduction

This preface offers an introduction to the question “What is Literature?” Engagements with Kenneth Burke, Jacques Derrida, and Charles Altieri, each of whom is an incisive theorist of literary experience, help to make the case for privileging the term “literarity” as a handle on literary experience. They offer a framework for thinking about how syntactical dynamics of language tease out an appreciation of human capacities for attention. This perspective gives rise to the hypothesis that attention is coordinate with reason-giving and augurs for a view of the work of art as a rationalistic enterprise without succumbing to iron laws of reason. A quick gloss of John Ashbery's poem “Daffy Duck in Hollywood” intimates the consequences of these assumptions that will be spelled out in the ensuing chapters.