Literature: Simultaneously Traditional and Revolutionary?

This week in class we began to delve more into the question of “what is literature?” with Douglass’s Narrative. The concept of control emerged as an important one: whether it’s control of meaning, of revelations, of tone, writers of Literature with a capital L always seem to approach their task with purpose. And I think there might be another aspect of control that relates to literature, one that we did not get to talking about in class: the notion of creating something revolutionary.

Aspects of the revolutionary have already come up in other class discussions: society often credits Poe with the creation of detective fiction; Douglass’s Narrative is a well-known example from what we have called the beginning of the African-American tradition in writing. We talked about The Last of the Mohicans as one of the very first truly American novels (whatever dozens of concepts that encompasses). It seems to me that as much as we have an image of literature as something traditional, and classic, we also hold a simultaneous and conflicting respect for literature’s ability to create something new.

It makes sense that one might find an aspect of the revolutionary in much of what we now acknowledge as important literature. Originality, after all, is something every writer seeks– and not just those who want their works to be read for centuries after their death. Nothing earns praise from being the same as everything else. Therefore, those works that take risks, whether with structure, theme, perspective, or anything else– and whose risks reveal something new and meaningful– are the works that society reveres.

I personally am curious as to how the works we read in the coming weeks fit or break away from this theory. (As I am, self-consciously, one of the very few people in the class who has not yet read The Scarlet Letter, I can’t comment on that one yet.) Is it possible that the very things we consider traditional are also crucially different from one another?