Belles-lettres

Belles-lettres or belles lettres is a term that is used to describe a category of writing. A writer
of belles-lettres is a belletrist. However, the boundaries of that category vary in different
usages.
Literally, belles-lettres is a French phrase meaning "beautiful" or "fine" writing. In this sense,
therefore, it includes all literary worksespecially fiction, poetry, drama, or essaysvalued
for their aesthetic qualities and originality of style and tone. The term thus can be used to
refer to literature generally. The Nuttall Encyclopedia, for example, describedbelles-lettres as
the "department of literature which implies literary culture and belongs to the domain of art,
whatever the subject may be or the special form; it includes poetry, the drama, fiction, and
criticism," while the Encyclopdia Britannica Eleventh Edition describes it as "the more
artistic and imaginative forms of literature, as poetry or romance, as opposed to more
pedestrian and exact studies."[1]
However, for many modern purposes, belles lettres is used in a narrower sense to identify
literary works that do not fall into other major categories, such as fiction, poetry or drama.
Thus, it would include essays, rcits, published collections
of speeches and letters, satirical and humorous writings, and other miscellaneous works.
The Oxford English Dictionary (2nd Edition) says that "it is now generally applied (when
used at all) to the lighter branches of literature." The term remains in use among librarians
and others who have to classify books: while a large library might have separate categories
for essays, letters, humor and so forth (and most of them are assigned different codes in, for
example, the Dewey decimal classification system), in libraries of modest size they are often
all grouped together under the heading belles lettres.
The phrase is sometimes used in a derogatory manner when speaking about the study of
literature: those who study rhetoric often deride many language departments (particularly
English departments in the English-speaking world) for focusing on the aesthetic qualities of
language rather than its practical application. A quote from Brian Sutton's article
in Language and Learning Across the Disciplines, "Writing in the Disciplines, First-Year
Composition, and the Research Paper", serves to illustrate the rhetoricians' opinion on this
subject and their use of the term:
Writing-in-the-disciplines adherents, well aware of the wide range of academic genres a firstyear composition student may have to deal with in the future, are unlikely to force those
students to venture so deeply into any one genre as to require slavish imitation. The only
first-year composition teachers likely to demand "conformity and submission" to a particular
kind of academic discourse are those English-department fixtures, the evangelical disciples
of literature, professors whose goal in first-year composition is to teach students to
explicate belles lettres. Writing-in-the-disciplines adherents, unlike teachers of literature-ascomposition, generally recognize the folly of forcing students to conform to the conventions
of a discourse community they have no desire to join.
In his Elements of Criticism, prominent Scottish-British belles lettres rhetorician Lord
Kames (16961782) describes the aim of the belles lettres movement as the want to "discover
a foundation for reasoning upon the taste of an individual" and "design a science of rational
criticism."[2] The focus of the Belletristic Rhetoric Theory is on defining the characteristics of
rhetorical style such as beauty, sublimity, propriety and wit all of which play a part in
affecting the emotion and reasoning capabilities of the audience. [3] Also important to those
studying rhetoric and belles lettres is defining the taste of the audience; this is key to being a
truly successful rhetorician or writer as another belles lettres rhetorician, Hugh Blair (1718

1800), states in Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, "taste is foundational to rhetoric and
necessary for successful spoken and written discourse." [4]