Literary language is only definable against a supposed plain ordinary language.

Evidence

This writing does not seek to discover and realise the power of words in a unique, univocal meaning, but in allowing the sounds and suggestions of a word to mix with those around it and proliferate. In English we would call this proliferation poetic or literary. ‘Literary’ language has been defined as a kind of writing where ‘words stand out as words (even as sounds) rather than being, at once, assimilable meanings’ and where their ‘quality of reference may be complex, disturbed, unclear’. In explanations of this kind, the literary or poetic is defined in opposition to something normal, to the plain or ordinary use of language. For the author of Eight Words, there was no such plain language. All writing worked by making words ‘stand out as words’, that is by evoking the echoes and resemblances in which one word/sound differs from the next. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 452

Categorization

• DEFINE: Contrasts the modern English definition of the literary (as deviation from plain language) with an Arabic tradition where there is no plain language at all.