they enable us to identify and describe the characteristics of a literary text in a pre-cise way
they can be used to express the premises of literary analysis, define basic terminolo-gy and explain the aims of the investigation
they allow for a systematic classification of texts and their respective characteristics
they enable us to position texts within broader historical contexts
Broad Concept All written documents are literature Problems Hardly viable Exclusion of oral traditions (e.g. story telling) Narrower Concepts Common denominator: exclusion of non poetic and non imaginative texts Beyond that little consensus