Literary metainstitutions: A philosophy of literature

Abstract

This article presents a philosophical approach to literature. One of the central ontological problems of the philosophy of literature is trying to answer the question "what is a literary fact?" or better, “what is and what is not literature?” I propose an institutionalist solution to this ontological problem through the development of the fundamental bases for what I call the meta-institutional theory of literature. I expose, first, my definition of literature as a meta-institutional system made up of two operatively dependent meta-institutions: the centralized literary institution and the marginal literary institution. I show that such meta-institutions are made up of person-institutions that operate through institutional acts oriented by agents that play various roles (author, reader, reader-author, transducer or interpreter, and complementary agents). Subsequently, I explain that literary meta-institutions work according to certain ideological functions that constitute the basis of beliefs shared by the agents of their constitutive Institutions-Persons. Such beliefs contribute both to the coordination of literary practices and to the production and reproduction of beliefs about literature. Finally, based on the proposed theory, I prove that a work acquires literary status —it can be considered as a literary work and therefore distinguished from other non-literary objects— by overcoming two crucial instances inherent to literary meta-institutions, namely, a instance of emergence and an instance of affirmation.