20

Inspired by Feuerhahn’s text (2020), this article seeks to place the issues present in his article on the terrain of literary history. Unlike in other fields, literary history treats the discourse of objects as a privileged source, rather than an epistemological obstacle. This difficulty in establishing an external point of view reveals an excessive dependence on a small number of high-prestige sources. Privileging certain objects as sources for their own history produces ventriloquistic effects that inhibit developing a historical account of the literary. By contrast, taking the discourse of the actors seriously—all the actors—would make it possible to restore, through the discordant plurality of past voices, the logic of the power relations that decided the outcome of their controversies. This perspective would shed useful light on the very concept of “literature” and on the academic discipline by that name, while remaining conscious of its own historicity.