In the vortex of cultural studies, literary studies are shipwrecked

Abstract

studies have been subsumed by a critical practice that at the time was believed to be revolutionary and is called cultural studies. Given this reality, it would seem indispensable to rethink the current situation and the future of literary criticism. But this devaluation also affects literature itself. Literature and the science that accompanies it have experienced a notorious setback with the boom in the implementation of the socalled cultural studies, which are defined by the expansion of the canon. An enlargement that does not seem to be constituted based on any aesthetic experience, whether in the traditional Kantian conception, or in Rancière’s renewed proposition, or correspond to the field of study of cultural anthropology. To recover the existence of the aesthetic fact is our main intention. In addition, we seek the most demarcated definition of text, dislocated by cultural studies that extend this notion from written language to the field of films, photographs, television series and even institutions. This is our starting point: the enjoyment provided by the aesthetic fact and the indispensable evaluative judgment that accompanies it. Underpinning this conjecture is the key idea that every aesthetic fact is a political fact, as Rancière argues.