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Popular Culture Review
structuralist mode, literature is but an aspect of the “Great Text,” a popular
notion among postmodern thinkers that allows unlimited thematic and analytical
latencies for the Text is All and All is the Text. Fish’s famous rhetorical
question disguised as a provocative book title. Is There a Text in This Class?,
could be seen as both an illustration and a disturbing justification of the refusal
to define our object of study, as if any science, human or not, could simply do
away with the description of its corpus and still claim to academic, if not
epistemological credibility.
Today’s practical necessity of defining the corpus of the discipline formerly
known as Literary Studies and currently in the process of being absorbed by
Cultural Studies is rendered all the more difficult by the fact that our object of
study is doubtlessly multimediatic, which forces us to consider the notion of
canon under a very different light. By now, the relationship between what we
conceive traditionally as being “literature” and other narrative media, such as
cinema or comic books, is clearly demonstrated by solid evidence: not only are
novels and comic books turned into films, but some films—generally the most
commercially viable—are also novelized and made into comic books. We are
therefore confronted by a more diverse and polymorphic corpus than ever,
which we logically need to define and evaluate if we want to provide some
tangibility to our field of research."^
If the literary canon has been challenged, and rightfully so, on ideological
grounds as non-representative of sexual and racial minorities, it has never been
questioned from the point of view of its multimediatic coherence. When Harold
Bloom locates, or rather freezes the status of Shakespeare by placing him at the
center of the Western Literary canon, he does not take into account that
Shakespeare’s most culturally significant works do not belong to literature but to
theatre^: the most emblematic figure of the Occidental Literary Canon happens
therefore to have expressed most of his literary genius through a medium which
precisely was not literature.^ The language of theatre implies a fragmentation of
the sender which becomes a multiple, collective entity composed by all the
agents involved in the production of a performed artifact, from the director to
the actors to the wardrobe master, by opposition to that of literature which
seldom accommodates more than one, or perhaps two senders.^ It could indeed
be argued that theatre is much closer to cinema than it has ever been to literature
since the primal elements that enter its communicative scheme are
fundamentally the same, namely actors, a director, and a performance. However,
neither Luis Bufiuel nor Stanley Kubrick have ever appeared eligible to literary
canonicity, whereas we have never questioned the privileged place Shakespeare,
Corneille, or Lope de Vega occupy in the English, French, and Spanish literary
canons respectively, nor have we wondered if the theological speculations of
Teresa of Avila or of Blaise Pascal actually belong to literature, even if they
show up in our official Spanish and French literary anthologies with depressing
regularity.