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Populär Culture Review
inform, albeit mostly in translation, most of the last three decades of poststructuralist inquiry: bluntly put, if it is French, it must be right.13
1.1. Fictional Theory
If the concept of literariness ultimately proves unable to define the
literary phenomenon, the efforts of the formalists and structuralists to rescue
literature from the ever menacing “Great Text” allow us to perceive the most
obvious flaw of post-structuralist criticism, that is the forceful confusion
between literality and literature; contrary to literature, the language of criticism
should strive to maintain a unilateral relationship between the signifier and
signified by using language in a monosemic manner, to precisely avoid
becoming literature: if literary criticism was supposed to interpret literature in
Order to better its understanding, then a brand of literary scholarship that
conceives itself as literature simply defies its purpose—we will not explain the
meaning of a short story by writing another short story.
Oblivious to this simple and quite evident fact, postmodem literary
scholarship has enthusiastically cultivated literariness in its discourse, aping the
liberties that Jacques Derrida, arguably the most influential critic in
Contemporary Anglo-Saxon literary criticism, took himself vis-ä-vis the French
language. Being a philosopher rather than a literary critic—yet another serious
anomaly when we consider his sacrosanct position within the field of literary
studies14 —Derrida expresses his epistemological doubts about the nature of
meaning in a manner that complements the elusiveness of his conceptions on
language and communication: whether the signified is irremediably
transcendental and any meaningful binary Opposition susceptible to be
deconstructed because based upon a hidden metaphysical System—making
everything potentially literature—is a purely philosophical proposition