Decontextualizing Context

“Decontextualizing Context”: even if my title sounds like a deconstructionist slogan, what I really want to consider is the relation between text and context, and the question of the autonomy of literature. If this autonomy exists, where are we to locate it–within the text itself (whether in terms of systematicity or of différance), or within the socio-historical conditions of its production and reception? This is a vast question, which carries with it the question of the historicity of “literature,” without which it is impossible to contemplate a “literary history.”