My second question for this week was similar to one Jacob posted on his blog, whether an attempt to define literature was for its previous uses or its contemporary understanding? I would think that it must be for the pieces already labeled and taught as literature, as creating a list to embody works not yet seen would probably exclude some material worth consideration.
Just a point unrelated to the Q&A was our discussion of whether there was a concept of something "new". I will assume I can safely define new as something unrecognizable to the observer. We need to remember that the purpose of catergorization is to generalize. The term dog only covers the shared properties of all dogs, but it does not specify every possible instance a dog may take shape. This is something I think is necessary to remind ourselves, for if nothing is new than this blog post has been posted by me before and I am wasting my time imitating a post I have already typed.
Please do not take the last line of my blog to be anything but an attempt at somewhat cynical humor.
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