BEYOND BOOK-CENTRISM:

ARCHIVE AND RELATIONAL ONTOLOGY IN THE LITERARY CULTURE

Abstract

The text contains theoretical-critical reflections whose purpose is to put the notion of literature under tension, establishing it beyond book-centrism. Taking a distance from book-centrism implies a shift towards public texts – newspaper articles, magazines, manifestos, and other printed materials – that denote generic, formal, and thematic transformations, although without excluding those produced in intimate spheres – diaries, letters, for example. Nor does it mean excluding the book, but rather starting from a “relational ontology,” whose epistemological basis adopts the notion of literary culture, this is, a complex system that ranges from communication processes to the problems involved in authorship, literate elites, the place of enunciation, circulation, reception, translation, and the intellectual sociability of networks, and that also questions the contexts involved in the text as well as the effects identified in readers. Thus, reflecting on literatures beyond book-centrism involves considering, before products, processes, the relational exercise implied by networks, the circulation of symbolic goods and, likewise, it makes it essential to examine two relevant factors: material culture and the archive as an event of discourse and as a syntactic articulation.