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You can't have the concpet of literary without the concept of non-literary

 You can’t have ‘literariness’ unless there is also a non-‘literariness’ from which to discriminate it:

The literary is literary only because it isn’t something else.

What it isn’t, inevitably, is an ‘everyday’ use of language.

There is snobbery at work here, for the language which serves well enough to get us through the working day will not, apparently, do to write literature in.

Literature is a special and a higher use of language. Formalism is exclusive in separating literary from everyday language and in trying to identify the conventions or ‘devices’ on which literature relies to distinguish itself.

Or is this view of 'literary' old ivory-tower decadence in vaguely scientific disguise.

(The concept of formalism can be traced as far back as Plato, who argued that 'eidos' (or shape) of a thing included our perceptions of the thing, as well as those sensory aspects of a thing which the human mind can take in. Plato argued that eidos included elements of representation and imitation, since the thing itself could not be replicated. Subsequently, Plato believed that eidos inherently was deceptive.

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