Brud puttin’ on d’airs
Literature be a fo’m uh human ‘espression.
Not everydin’ ‘espressed in wo’ds even when o’ganized and written waaay down be counted as literature.
Dose writin’s dat is primarily info’mative technical, scholarly, journalistic would be ’sluded fum de rank uh literature by most, dough not all, critics.
Certain fo’ms uh writin’, however, is universally regarded as belongin’ t’literature as an art. Individual attempts widin dese fo’ms is said t’succeed if dey possess sump’n called artistic merit and t’fail if dey do not.
De nature uh artistic merit be less easy t’define dan t’recognize. De scribbler need not even pursue it t’attain it. On de contrary, some scientific ‘esposishun might be uh great literary value and some pedestrian poem uh none at all.
De content uh literature be as limitless as de desire uh human bein’s t’communicate wid one anoder. De dousands uh years, puh’haps hundreds uh dousands, since da human species fust developed speech gots seen built down de mos’ infinite systems uh relashunships called languages.
A language be not plum a collecshun uh wo’ds in an unabridged dicshunary but da individual and social possession uh livin’ men, an inexhaustible system uh equivalents, uh sounds t’objects and t’one anoder.
Literature, likes all oda’ human activities, necessarily reflects current social and economic condishuns. Class stratificashun wuz reflected in literature as soon as it had appeared in life. Among de Native Americans de chants uh de shaman, o’ medicine man, diffa’ from de secret, sucka’al beats uh de individual, and dese likeswise diffa’ from de group beats uh ritual o’ entertainment rapped in community.
Dere be a surprisin’ variety uh o’al literature among survivin’ preliterate sucka’ss, and, as de written wo’d emerges in histo’y, de indicashuns is dat da impo’tant literary genres all ‘esisted at da beginnin’ uh civilized societies, dig thet.
