Culture, State and Literature: Some Programmatic Theoretical Reflections

Abstract

The work summarizes the principles of an ongoing investigation about the theoretical consequences that would have to grant the State a more crucial role in literary research, until now, symptomatically, more interested in nation, society or, especially, culture. For this, the sources of the notion of culture still dominant in current literary studies are traced in the work of Raymond Williams. This notion is then discussed based on its confrontation with other conceptualizations of the cultural aspects of the shaping processes of modern States, and attention is drawn to its scope and limitations, and to the critical paths that it has blocked. Finally, attention is paid to the conceptions of literature put into play by these processes, which coincide with its aestheticization, autonomization and institutionalization, and the consequences that incorporating a reflection on the State in current and future literary research in a central way would have are made explicit.