Literature? Illiterature?

Hmm.  This is another snotty entry about other people's blogs.   Recently the random blog selection thing has been linking me to blogs about books.  I should be thrilled, but I am mystified by the book lists.  They are of course American - and therefore inevitably contain details of many writers I have never heard of.   Curiously these are balanced with extremely high-minded, impenetrable blogs which are written in a quasi-structuralist lingo which is largely impenetrable and is probably, at bottom, not saying very much of interest.   I know that sound arrogant, but over the years when I have managed to penetrate the meanings of structuralist writing I have found that it is usually stating the bleeding obvious anyway.  So the language isn't there to illuminate, or elucidate, but merely to conceal - first from the profani, and secondly to hide the author's unoriginal ruminations.  And that's a shame really, because it means, like management speak, it is a weapon in a not very interesting struggle between colleagues - who uses the hottest technical jargon = who gets to crow on top of the dungheap.

But I digress - the blog I looked at was called Lost in Literature - the lady concerned had read about 4 books this year (so lost in each one she couldn't get out?) and it made me wonder what the definition of literature was - really, it is just reading material I suppose, as in "Would you like some literature on our automatic potato peeler?"   In that context I suppose glamour novels, and chick lit with a bit of a supernatural spin rates quite highly as literature. 

So where did the idea come from the "Literature" was proper writing - and how can these two ideas be accommodated?  A literary novel isn't remotely related to washing machine instructions after all.  Perhaps readibility is the criterion... and many washing machine instructions used not to be readable - having apparently been translated from German to Japanese to Serbo - Croat to English, with much damage to clarity in the process. And Finegans Wake is apparently unreadable (mind you some idiots believe Ulysses to be unreadable - which makes one wonder if they really know how to read (don't ask me - I love the book, but I'm no expert on how to read)).

So literature doesn't in practice have to be readable... so maybe we should change it's name - to?  Er, scripture?  Because the common feature is that the stuff is written down, and readability is not claimed for it. 

What else is unreadable?  This is a subjective matter - I may find things unreadable which other people enjoy tremendously, I cannot really understand writing on linguistics or electronics. I didn't find A Brief History of Time unreadable exactly, but one needs to hold on tight and keep reading (and I didn't, so I didn't finish it).  I ought to compile a list of illiterature!