La Teoría literaria en el fin de siglo: panorama desde España

Abstract

This paper offers a panorama of the research in Literary Theory during the last quarter of the 20th century and the first years of the 21st. It does not intend to come to ultimate conclusions, but to offer a partisan vision of the topic. In the first part of the paper, the author gives a summary of the current «epistemologic crisis», followed by another summary of the post-structuralist trends. Regarding this first section, the author confronts some of the revolutionary theories in the current North American Scholarship to the more conservative European Tradition. In this second section, there are three big differentiated areas: 1) The massive importance of the reading, analyzed under a Hermeneutic perspective and the importance of the Reception. 2) The return of the History and some of its problems, posing the notion of «canon» in the centre of the discussion, 3) The confluence of Poetics and Rhetoric in the Discourse dimension of the Language; this last section, whose fruitful and live-to-day trajectory are described, provides the example of the Dramatology.