Resistance to Literature

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.