Os estudos literários na era da pós-verdade

Abstract

Although usually applicable to the political context, what came to be known as post-truth, that is, the concept that points to circumstances in which the boundaries between fact and fiction become highly porous and in which personal beliefs are endowed with values equal or superior to facts acknowledged to be objective, affects also literary studies in the academic environment. This is the exemplary case of recent interpretations of “Bartleby, the scrivener”, a story written by Herman Melville in 1853. While traditional hermeneutics defined interpretive validity in terms of a rigorous contextualization of the text in in its historical and cultural moment, recent interpretations associated with the postmodern period make possible the legitimation of interpretive practices based on idiosyncratic choices or the reading subject or on arbitrary systems of thought.