Te veel werkelijkheid is dodelijk voor kunst

Abstract

This article explores the political effects of literariness. Literariness is considered to be the mediumspecific feature of the literary artefact and goes beyond the level of the one dimensional meaning of the text. Against the background of the discussion launched by De Revanche van de Roman by Thomas Vaessens the author meticoulously analyses the suicidal implications of the proposed turn to Cultural Studies. She argues that in the last decade feminist and postcolonial studies have indicated the dangers of reductive readings of literary works and have been proposing to return to indepth intertextual analyses, that is the analyses of the interaction of text, context and reader without re-installing the authority of the author as Vaessens wants to have it.