What is the significance of the 'weed' analogy?
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Correct answer: A. Such terms do not serve a descriptive function
Explanation
Like 'weed', 'literature' is a judgement of value and function, not a description of a kind of object.
Note: Passage II is from Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), which is copyrighted and not reproduced. Eagleton argues that 'literature' names a number of ways in which people relate themselves to writing, not a fixed set of texts with an 'essence'. Any text can be read 'non-pragmatically', and, as with John M. Ellis's 'weed', the word is a functional, not an ontological, term: it tells us what we do with a text, not what it permanently is.