Tools for a genealogical literary historiography

The essay tries to outline a literary historiography which comes to terms with a Foucaultian approach. After a concise discussion of the Foucaultian position and some proposed transformations, the concepts 'genealogy' and 'power' are explicated. The essay proposes a literary historiography which is centered around the concept of discourse. To this end we offer a number of conceptual options: Strategic 'dispositive', logic of confrontation, intertextuality, logic of mutation, pool of variation, limitationality. Affirming the correlation of literature with power, this conception, we suggest, is incompatible with notions which attribute to literature a subversive or anarchic quality.