La resistenza alla teoria

The paper deals with the status of humanities and literary studies in the context of the cognitive capitalism. After a brief survey of the so called crisis of the literary criticism, it goes back to the last decades to identify the main cause of the present situation: the failure of the project of the literary theory as it was conceived during the Nineteenth Century, in particular between the Sixties and the Seventies. That great failure produced, among other effects, a weakening of the theoretic awareness and a chaotic growing up of Studies, Theories and a typical postmodern phenomenon that Remo Ceserani called “the supermarket of methods”. The only way to get out from this impasse is to renew and to improve the project of the theory of literature, following some simple goals and rules that the paper points out in its final part.