Todorov Tzvetan. The notion of literature

New Literary History, 2007, 38: 1–12.Before launching into the awesome question of the nature of literature, let us begin, as a precautionary measure, by examining not literature itself but rather the kind of discourse which, like this very study, takes literature as its object. The difference will be one of approach rather than of objective; but who can say whether the course of the inquiry is not of greater interest than its final results?