Abstract

TOPUZIAN, Marcelo. Literature, State and Literary Criticism: a discussion. CELEHIS [online]. 2020, n.39, pp.41-50. ISSN 2313-9463.

The paper, framed in a research project on the relationship between literature and the State, reviews the ways in which this link was elaborated in literary criticism in Argentina. The starting point is the criticism made by David Lloyd and Paul Thomas (1998) to the interpretive paradigm of Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society (1958). This will allow to elaborate a model of the theoretical positions in discussion within Argentine literary studies around the turn of the century and to explore their possible contemporary lines of descent. At the same time, this model will lead to methodological proposals for the current practice of literary research. The central hypothesis aims to situate these positions in the debates about the theoretical, methodological and disciplinary field of cultural studies, although they were not translated, at the time, into a clear dependence on it in all cases. The propositions reviewed anticipate some subsequent critical and political debates, which, however, did not have a clear effect on the discussion about the conceptions of literary research that were effectively contemporary with them. It is, in synthesis, a critical proposal about contemporary literary studies in Argentina.

Keywords : State; literature; criticism; cultural studies; method.

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