Pronouncing the name literature: the strangeness of latinity

Abstract

Throughout the Western tradition, “strangeness” has been, from Chklovsky and Russian formalism to Derrida, one of the characterizations of literature. In Demeure, the philosopher says that “literature” is a name and that it belongs to a language: “Literature is a Latin word”. But this belonging is problematized. If, for the formalists and heirs of formalism, “strangeness”, as a way of thinking about literature, was at the service of an autonomy, the question that Derrida moves us to ask is “is there something non-European in this strange institution called literature?”. With the recent notions of “heteronomy”, by Florencia Garramuño, and of “post-autonomy”, by Josefina Ludmer, the strangeness passes for a latinity that does not guarantee autonomy. Also questioning what is foreign to Latinity, the term “oralitura”, by Leda Maria Martins, stresses other ways of naming. The aim of this essay is to think about how this link between literature and Latinity, through the operator of strangeness, rereads and transforms the colonial European paradigm of literature, in which the strangeness of Latinity, contrary to attesting autonomy, bears witness to a non-belonging and an invention of a common that passes for the loss of the superiority traditionally attributed to the literary.