About literary systems and national literatures

Abstract

In his article "About Literary Systems and National Literatures," Elias Torres J. Feijó offers a polysystemic analysis with examples from the Iberian Peninsula. He argues that a community's literature can be understood as a) the gathering of so-called literary activities, which take place in a social space or b) something that identifies certain characteristics of a part or the whole of the members in a given social space. For his analysis, Torres Feijó employs Itamar Even-Zohar's notion of polysystem because it allows us to interpret each system generated by members of a given community and its delimitation, differentiation, and integration mechanisms in supra-systemic relational schemes. In addition, mechanisms can be obtained for the analysis of the fabrication and promotion of formulas which have as their objective systemic sovereignty: proto-systems, subsystems, and para-systems.