In response to Nicole - full post here - http://bradenphilandlit.blogspot.com/2012/01/oral-literature.html
While I don't necessarily disagree that literature should be a written work, I want to say that as philosophers, we are not looking for what is currently defined as literature, rather we are looking to see if that definition is unnecessarily inclusive or exclusive. Additionally, just because something has been associated with one word for a long time does not mean that it would be 'wrong' to change it - it may very well be warranted to do so.
Secondly, I was wondering if you thought a distinction should be made between the text of a speech and that of the written play? I know that I would certainly make that distinction. I would also not view even the text of a speech as literature, if literature is binary. I would say that based on it not satisfying my own sufficient conditions of literature - Not having text and dialogue, not being fictitious, or conveying a message through slightly indirect means.
Thirdly, you added coherency as a necessary condition for a work to be literature. I was wondering works like "next to of course god america i" (e e cummings) fit in to your definition - I would not argue in favor of it's coherency in either immediately discernible meaning or grammar. I suppose, in addition to that, where would a work like "The Sound and The Fury" by William Faulkner come into this. The story is arranged in quite the incoherently, the narrators (four of them) tell many small parts, not in chronological order, of the same story from their individual perspectives. One of the narrators has the mental capacity of a small boy, and so, his sections has terribly lousy grammar - he doesn't differentiate between past, present, and future.
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