Literature and historicity

The course is inscribed about the recent debates on the relation between history and literature, seeking to surpass the two preferred modes according to which it was considered. On one hand, historians have traditionally used literary texts as a historical source and have raised accusations of neglecting the specificity of literature, its relative independence from its context of production. On the other hand, since the late 1960s, the emphasis on the textual character of historical knowledge has led to the approximation of historical and literary narratives, leading historians to defend the privileged relation of history to truth, given its dependence on files. In this course, we plan on discussing the historicity of literature as a social practice and mode of qualification of writings, that is, the fact that the modern concept of literature only emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century, breaking with a rhetorical-poetical regime of production, circulation and appropriation of texts. Thus, three axes of structuring the discipline are defined: 1). Literature before literature; 2). The historicity of literary categories: authorship, plagiarism, writer, realism, gender, reading, etc. 3). Literature and the experience of time.