Some TV commercials do. Taster s Choice instant coffee, for example, ran a series of ads over the course of several months that amounted to one-minute episodes in a romantic story. An attractive woman and an attractive and slightly younger man discovered they shared a taste for Taster s Choice, and eventually their relationship blossomed into romance. Obviously the writers of the driving booklet do not invite us to get emotionally or imaginatively involved the way the writers of the commercials did. However, writers don t have to give the invitation.
Readers can have a literary experience with a workaday text by approaching in a playful spirit.
I read once that an excerpt from an Australian pamphlet about raising soybeans was entered in a poetry contest by some prankster. It won a prize. In this case it was obviously the satisfied expectation of the judges, not the intent of the original writer, that qualified the work as literary. Q. Wait now. If a playful spirit is necessary to literature, that leaves out Paradise Lost .