What is literature? To many different people it signifies different things. Terry Eagleton examines this question in his essay quite thoroughly. Eagleton states that literature can be fact or fiction, 'historical' or 'artistic', or 'creative' or 'imaginative'. I think that to most people it is all of these things combined. It is implied that anything from Shakespeare to Superman comic books can be determined as literature depending on the reader. An eight-year-old would consider a comic book to be factual and a piece of literature,whereas an adult would find it fictional and hardly in the same sphere as Shakespeare. Historical and artistic are two more factors to be considered. When one reads a historical textbook they consider it to be all historical which therefore means that it should be factual, but unfortunately that is not always the case. Many times history is either exaggerated or recorded wrong. So what we think to be historical and factual sometimes is not. As for artistic literature, it is used to arouse our imagination and show us a new new light. It entices our literary tastebuds in one way or another.

Another aspect that Eagleton focuses on is how things are worded and what symbols are used. Most writing is directed at certain age groups. Literature that that is targeted toward children would be written simplier and have morals than that written for adults. The issues between adult literature and children's literature are extreme far cries of one another. The sound, imagery, rhyme scheme, etc. are much more detailed and complicated for adults because they have a higher intellegence level than that of small children. The writing tools used for small children's literature are more basic and easier for them to understand.

My last point that I choose to comment on in regard to Eagleton's piece is the length ot the piece of writing. Anything from two-hundred pages to five pages is called literature. It depends on the person reading and evaluating the writting. Length is of no importance when being considered as a work of art or not. The content of a work should have more importance than the page length.

My idea of literature is a piece of writing that makes me use my imagination as I read it. It tantalizes me to finish it so that I can know how it turned out in the end. Almost anything is literature to me as long as I find it interesting to read and evaluate. That includes things from "Cosmopoliton" to "MacBeth". My define of literature is that it is a piece of writing that stimulates the mind and imagination at the same time without ever considering the source, length, or author, but just the enjoyable content within the story and your mind.