Necessary and Sufficient

What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for a work to be considered literature?

While some of us contend that literature can and should be defined classically, the burden subsequently falls upon us to demonstrate how. Jacob has already attempted this definition, and I believe it is a defensible position. Since I agree with Jacob's definition of art, and since I consider literature to be an art form, I would begin my definition of literature in much the same manner. Art is the creation of an object through the use of an aesthetic medium with the intent to convey and embody a concept or emotion. Therefore, I agree with the beginning of Jacob's definition, that literature is an object created through the use of language with the intent to convey and embody a concept and emotion. The only area of contention that I thought I might have was with the qualification that literature must be a narrative. I thought that something important might be excluded with that stipulation, and I wondered why we needed to include it at all.

Then two thoughts occurred to me. The first was that without the inclusion of narrative as a descriptive qualifier, the definition of literature might then be used to include a work such as "Spazio." Also, depending on how we define narrative in this case, we may not have a problem at all. I would like to posit that narrative in this definition should mean a story or account of events; which is broad enough to include the works we should include and still discriminates against works like Spazio.