What is literature?
Literature is meant to encode the collective unconscious at a given time and to provide something of a model or prediction of what society will be like moving forward — somewhat in the way that a quarterback throws a pass slightly downfield of their receiver.
I regard it as a fundamentally different activity from writing. Writing can be anything so long as it’s honest. Literature is more of a group think and collective act — more urban planning than architecture. Its shape often isn’t clear until much later when it emerges as something like the fossil record of a particular moment in time.
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