WHAT IS LITERATURE?

TO BEGIN WITH, I CONSIDERED IMPORTANT TO SPEAK A LITTLE BIT ABOUT THE FIELD OF STUDY WE ARE DEALING WITH: "LITERATURE". HERE IT IS WHAT THE LITERARY CRITIC CHARLES E. BRESSLER STATES ABOUT THE TERM: "For centuries, writers, literary historians, and others have debated about but failed to agree on a definition for this term. Many assume that literature is simply anything that is written, thereby declaring a city telefhone book, a cookbook, and a road atlas to be literary works [..]". "Such a definition, however, eliminates the important oral traditions upon wich much of our literature is based. For example, Homer´s Illiad and Odyssey [..]"
CHARLES BRESSLER GOES ON EXPLAINING THAT "Many argue that a text must posses particular qualities before it can be considered literature".
THESE ARE THE PARTICULAR QUALITIES HE ENUMERATES:

1) "the artist´s creation or secondary world often mirrors the author´s primary world [..]. Since reality or the primary world is highly structured, so must be the secondary world. To achieve this structure, the artist must create plot, character, tone, symbols and conflict [..] to produce a literary work.

2) "Still other critics add the "test of time" criterion to their list of the essential components of literature. This criterion denotes literature´s functional or cultural value: if people value a written work [..] they frequently decree it to be literature whether or not it conteins the prescribed or so-called essential elements of a text"

3) "What this work may contain is a peculiar aesthetic quality that distinguishes it as literature from other forms of writing.

AFTER ENUMERATING THESE QUALITIES CHARLES BRESSLER ASKS THE FOLLOWING QUESTION "is a literary work ontological?- that is, does it exist in and of itself, or must it have an audience, a reader, before it becomes literature?

AND FINALLY HE STATES "Perhaps, then, the literary competence of the readers themselves helps determine whether a work should be considered literature."

SO... WHAT DO YOU THINK LITERATURE IS?