why one litreray text might be regarded as more literary than the other?

Question

William Shakespeare - Sonnet 18
Shall I Compare Thee To A Summer's Day?

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? a
Thou art more lovely and more temperate: b
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, a
And summer's lease hath all too short a date: b

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, c
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd; d
And every fair from fair sometime declines, c
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd; d

But thy eternal summer shall not fade e
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest; f
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade, e
When in eternal lines to time thou growest: f

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, g
So long lives this and this gives life to thee. g


Oscar Wilde's novel the Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter 1 – ‘the studio was filled with the rich odour of roses’.

The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.

From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flame like as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid, jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion. The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their way through the long unmown grass, or circling with monotonous insistence round the dusty gilt horns of the straggling woodbine, seemed to make the stillness more oppressive. The dim roar of London was like the bourdon note of a distant organ.

In the centre of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty, and in front of it, some little distance away, was sitting the artist himself, Basil Hallward, whose sudden disappearance some years ago caused, at the time, such public excitement and gave rise to so many strange conjectures.

Answer 1

Defining Literariness can be problematic but I believe that it depends on readers and critic's tastes.

Literariness is the sum of special linguistic and formal properties that distinguish literary texts from non‐literary texts, according to the theories of Russian Formalism. The leading Formalist Roman Jakobson declared in 1919 that ‘the object of literary science is not literature but literariness, that is, what makes a given work a literary work’. Rather than seek abstract qualities like imagination as the basis of literariness, the Formalists set out to define the observable ‘devices’ by which literary texts—especially poems— foreground their own language, in metre, rhyme, and other patterns of sound and repetition. Literariness was understood in terms of defamiliarization, as a series of deviations from ‘ordinary’ language. It thus appears as a relation between different uses of language, in which the contrasted uses are liable to shift according to changed contexts.

Try to compare the Shakespeare's sonnet to Wilde's Picture of Dorian that you have presented. Which one employs vivid images and is more memorable?



good luck