The End of Literature. An Exercise in Comparative Literary Theory

Abstract

This paper argues from a perspective that privileges the points of contact between different theoretical frames and traditions, whether from a national, disciplinary or generic point of view. A review and symptomatic reading of some treatments of the question of the possible end of literature or its most recent and future transformations allow it propose an assessment of the ways in which literary studies face today the problem of the statute of literature itself. In this perspective, we discuss and analyze texts of William Marx, Tzvetan Todorov, Josefina Ludmer, Eloy Fernández Porta and Agustín Fernández Mallo. From this, conclusions are drawn regarding the usefulness of the category of autonomy in current literary criticism, the importance of the modalities through which criticism studies the relationships between literature and the market, and what this all means when the intervention of criticism is intended as actually committed with the contemporary developments of literature.