Popular Culture Review Vol. 22, No. 1, Winter 2011 | Page 30

26 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.