Literary Scholarship, Literary Criticism: What’s in a Name?

Abstract

The use of the term ‘literary scholarship’ or ‘literary studies’ by workers and researchers in literary phenomena is not always reflexive, and pointing back at the literary as the direct object of the intellectual activity. This is not new, but goes a long way back to the first introduction of modern literature in Anglo-American university studies, and is part of the heritage of humanist philosophy. This paper is an enquiry about theory in literary studies, and therefore will look into a number of philosophical and theoretical accounts of literary phenomena to draw materials to substantiate the argument that at its core, literary scholarship or literary theory has an account of what literature consists of. This knowledge of the essential nature of literature, which is that it is art – of a certain kind, namely mimesis by means of language alone is what should guide the selection of works that are taught and researched in formal studies of literature.