From Music to Literature

I ONCE CAME ACROSS A TEXT ENTITLED “HISTORY OF THE WORLD,” constituting a collection of students’ bloopers. One of them runs like this “In midevil times most of the people were alliterate. The greatest writer of the time was Chaucer, who wrote many poems and verse and also wrote literature”! As sometimes happens, this is a clever blooper indeed, which shows how difficult it is to assign “literature” a specific position as object of knowledge. Literature is certainly more than texts, but what can it be?