What is Literary Studies? It is, obviously, the study of literature, but that answer only poses a new question: What is literature?

There are many different definitions of literature. Almost everyone agrees that we must draw a distinction between literature and ordinary language. Some say literature is artistic. Some say literature is imaginative. My definition of literature is bloated and clunky, but useful in its bloatedness and clunkiness: I say that literature is written or spoken imitation that demonstrates by the repetition and transgression of formal conventions an acquaintance with a given tradition of writing or speaking. In other words, something is only literature if its author is conscious of and responsive to a given tradition.

If so, then, by extension, Literary Studies would be the interpretation of writing that is working within a tradition. Or, to build off of the bloated and clunky but useful definition, we can say that Literary Studies is the academic discourse that addresses the meaning of written or spoken imitation that demonstrates by the repetition and transgression of formal conventions an acquaintance with a given tradition of writing or speaking.

This answer to the question, “What is literary studies?” is slightly more interesting than the obvious answer I noted at first. What this more interesting answer suggests is that Literary Studies is necessarily formal. Fine, but what does it mean to be formal?

For Literary Studies to be formal is for it to be attentive to patterns in language that exist across texts and throughout time. Those patterns may be big or small: big like concerns with kind, genre, character, plot, symbolism, and so forth, or small like concerns with meter, rhyme, metaphor, polyptaton, and the like.

Because literary studies is necessarily formal, “form is content,” as the literary critic Cleanth Brooke said. What Brooks meant is that the forms at play in a literary text should be the content of our interpretations. If so, then it follows that “content is not content.” In other words, the ideas communicated in a text should not be the focus of a Literary Studies analysis; instead, the ways in which those ideas are communicated should be our focus.

In short, Literary Studies is all about how someone says something, not what someone says.

In this line of thought, Literary Studies is necessarily literary history. One cannot do a Literary Studies interpretation of a text that is isolated from the literary tradition(s) in which that text works. To attempt to study a text in isolation would be absurd, from a Literary Studies perspective, because one could not identify the formal elements of the text, those that refer back to (repeating and transgressing against) previous literary texts and traditions.

In sum, we can say that Literary Studies is concerned with the ways that language is used. If it isn’t concerned with language use, it isn’t Literary Studies. Literary Studies is about the ways in which writers use the formal resources of literature to represent and comment upon life.

We are now in a position to ask and answer another question: What isn’t Literary Studies?

A study that does not attend to the ways in which language is used is not a literary study, even if that study is on a literary work.

It should therefore be said that Literary Studies is not the only thing you can do with literature. There are a number of other ways in which to study literature that aren’t, technically speaking, Literary Studies. Perhaps the most common is what I would call “thematic studies,” those that consider the treatment of a topic – love, death, race, or sexuality, for instance – in a literary work. Such studies are not literary studies because they are not concerned with the way in which language is being used.

For example, a paper that addresses the theme of love in Romeo and Juliet is not a literary study. The literary study would be the paper that asks how Shakespeare used the genre of tragedy to comment upon love. Or, What did Milton believe about God? That’s a thematic study. What does Milton’s imagery of ephemerality suggest about his understanding of God? That’s a literary study.

As I see it, the American high school does a great job preparing students to do Literary Studies, but it does a terrible job doing Literary Studies. In my experience, high school teaches students (sometimes in profoundly impressive ways) how to recognize the formal features of literature – meter, asyndeton, rhyme scheme, situational irony, etc. – but high school rarely does a good job helping students understand why these things matter.

The end of literary studies is not the recognition of formal rhetorical devices. The end of literary studies is a discussion of how literary writers use formal rhetorical devices to represent life, thereby giving us new ways to understand and experience our world.

The end of literary studies is not, for example, the recognition that Milton used blank verse in Paradise Lost. The end of Literary Studies is a discussion of how Milton used blank verse in Paradise Lost to associate the Christian empire he represented with the English nation.

When writing a literary studies paper, you should use the formal terms of literary studies, but your paper shouldn’t revolve around a catalog of literary devices used to achieve a certain effect. Instead, it’s much more effective to consider one literary device or technique in detail and to thematize it (i.e., to discuss how it serves as an organizational concept for the text).

In other words, do not organize a paper around a list of rhetorical devices (e.g., “Richard Loncraine makes his film a tragedy through the use of point of view, music, and dumbshow”).

Institutionally speaking, there are two main branches of Literary Studies: English and Comparative Literature.

English is the branch of Literary Studies that addresses literature in the English language. The English discipline looks at works of English literature in the context of the English tradition. It must be said that this version of Literary Studies can be recognized in any national context: French, South African, Chinese, etc. At the heart of any nation-specific Literary Studies is the notion that a culture’s literary writings can and must be considered in the context of that culture’s literary tradition.

Comparative Literature is the branch of Literary Studies that addresses literature across national borders, across time periods, across languages, across genres, across disciplines, and across boundaries between literature and the other arts (music, painting, dance, film, etc.). At the heart of Comparative Literature is the notion that literary writings from one tradition can be brought into conversation with literary writings from another tradition in order to reveal something new about the works, the traditions, the cultures, or literature as such.