26
Populär Culture Review
depend mostly on the Century, leaving the actual definition of literary genres in
the same uncertainty as the corpus itself.
An actual, functional definition of literature has never been the priority
of literary studies, and as we move into the still uncharted universe of interdisciplinary cultural studies, such definition does not even appear to be any
longer pertinent; the dramatic changes that have altered the way we transmit and
perceive narrated universes over the last few decades call indeed for an urgent
Overall re-conceptualization of our corpus of study and methodology, which
naturally transcends the semantic possibilities of the word “literature.” It would
be preferable to identify the body before proceeding to any investigation.
0.2. Un-deflnition Associated
The last three decades of post-structuralist theoretical practices have
further complicated the issue by erasing the distinction between criticism and
literature, 6 and based upon a gross mistranslation of a decontextualized quote
from Derrida’s O f Grammatology taken as axiomatic, tuming every sphere of
human experience into a “text,” for, as we all know by now, “there is nothing
outside the text” 7 and consequently, everything is literature. This new level of
confusion has allowed critics to abuse rhetorical devices of a literary nature—
metaphors, play on words, original spellings, flights of lyricism—to the point of
claiming and sometimes even obtaining literary Status. Many highly respected
lighthouses of post-structuralism have evolved towards Creative writing, such as
Helene Cixous and Eve Kosofsky Sedwick, whose late works are poetic and
auto-biographic rather than critical, or Julia Kristeva, who, after promoting
successively structuralism, psychoanalysis, and feminist semiotics, has tumed
her interest towards detective stories, perhaps encouraged by the planetary
success of The Da Vinci Code} Naturally, when critics claim the Status of
Creative writers, not only does the possibility of defining literature as an object
of study becomes yet more remote, but the task of literary criticism itself
suddenly appears either redundant or simply superfluous: the investigation
cannot merge with the object of study without immediately losing its reason to
exist.
The last three decades or so of over-conceptualized artsy theoretical
discourse have obliterated what the formalists and structuralists had achieved
when they attempted to establish the bases for a possible “science of literatur R