2021
Cairn
Stéphane Zékian, « Les mots en partage : Notes sur les langues de l’histoire littéraire », Questions de communication, ID : 10670/1.f5985e...
Inspired by W. Feuerhahn’s text, this article seeks to place the questions on the terrain proper to literary history. Unlike in other fields, literary history treats the discourse of objects as a privileged source, rather than an epistemological obstacle. This difficulty in establishing an external point of view reveals an excessive dependence on a small number of high-prestige sources. Privileging certain objects as sources for their own history produces ventriloquistic effects that inhibit developing a historical account of the literary. On the contrary, taking the discourse of the agents – of all the agents – seriously would make it possible to restore, through the discordant plurality of past voices, the logic of the relations of power that decided the outcome of their controversies. This perspective would shed useful light on the very concept of “literature”, and also on the academic discipline by that name, while remaining conscious of its own historicity.