Literary Theory and Comparative Literature Today: Some Reflections

Abstract

What is the current status of the discipline of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature? How has the work published by 452ºF. Journal of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature contributed to the field? These questions are the starting point for the reflections included in these critic’s notes, which have been conceived as a collective text to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the journal. The authors in these notes –founding members of the journal and/or reknowned specialists– take a retrospective view of the field and consider how the economic crisis and the crisis of literary studies are revealed as trigger events for its reconfiguration and, also, for the emergence of 452ºF. Journal of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature. In turn, these reflections lay out a current panorama of the field that, while not exhaustive, does allow us to draw a cartography whose boundaries extend into other disciplines, revealing sites of intersection where different investigations and perspectives are in dialogue, and which have shaped this journal over the last ten years.