What we have here, after all, is an institution based on the possibility of saying anything you can imagine. . . .

"What we have here, after all, is an institution based on the possibility of saying anything you can imagine. This is central to what literature is: for any orthodoxy, any belief, any value, a literary work can mock it, parody it, imagine some different and monstrous fiction. From the novels of the Marquis de Sade, which sought to work out what might happen in a world where action followed a nature conceived as unconstrained appetite, to Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses which has caused so much outrage for its use of sacred names and motifs in a context of satire and parody, literature has been the possibility of fictionally exceeding what has previously been thought and written. For anything that seemed to make sense, literature could make it nonsense, go beyond it, transform it in a way that raised the question of its legitimacy and adequacy.

Literature had been the activity of a cultural elite, and it has been what is sometimes called 'cultural capital': learning about literature gives you a stake in culture that may pay off in various ways, helping you fit in with people of higher social status. But literature cannot be reduced to this conservative social function: it is scarcely the purveyor of 'family values' but makes seductive all manner of crimes, from Satan's revolt against God in Milton's Paradise Lost to Raskolinikov's murder of an old woman in Dostoevski's Crime and Punishment. It encourages resistance to capitalist values, to the practicalities of getting and spending. Literature is the noise of culture as well as its information. It is an entropic force as well as cultural capital. It is a writing that calls for a reading and engages readers in problems of meaning.

. . . Jonathan Culler . . . Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction . . . 39-40 . . .