Resistance to Literature

TLDR: In this article, the authors argue that those who refer to literature plain and simple, without the quotation marks designed to suspend the habitual reference of the term, run the risk of losing sight of the present crisis of the paradigm, including the theoretical discourses and disciplinary practices that reveal and intensify that crisis.

Abstract: Those who refer to literature plain and simple, without the quotation marks designed to suspend the habitual reference of the term, run the risk of losing sight of the present crisis of the paradigm, including the theoretical discourses and disciplinary practices that reveal and intensify that crisis. Among the latter, the practice known as Cultural Studies acquires its place of relevance in close connection with the problematization of the literary text's undecidable nature. Surely, in the expression "literary text," the former term still carries the heavier burden of disputability-and this should not surprise us. Once the phenomenon called "literature" is placed in a secure, undivided, independent, and immune position, the result is a silencing or suspension of the relevant cultural conditions that have situated it as a contingent notion. The flip side to that silence is the exclusion of subaltern spaces, an exclusion generated by a canon founded on a concept of language that is marked in a specific aesthetic sense and contains the power to cover up its own historicity. The most immediate effect of a contingency that wraps itself in secrecy to hide its own dimensions is an elevation of the paradigm to the privileged position of universality. Although, as Garcia Canclini pointed out in a slightly different context, there is no "reason to abandon the