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In 2007, Tzvetan Todorov, an eminent linguist and one of the leaders of the structuralist modernity that influenced the teaching of language and literature in a decisive and long lasting way, published an essay, La littérature en péril (Literature in peril), that deeply questioned this domination and its consequences on teaching. He agreed with the reader seeking in literature something to give meaning to his / her existence, against the primacy given to textuality. In 2011, Jean-Marie Schaeffer, in his Petite écologie des études littéraires (Little ecology of literary studies), also followed this line of thought and concluded to the dead ends of the modernist reduction of literature and of its teaching. Acknowledging the crisis in literary studies, the author believes that it requires analysing the foundations of our relationship to the world, and understanding literature as an access to a specific mode of experience. As Hannah Arendt wanted, every crisis provides an opportunity to get to the essence of a problem. The crisis in literary education highlights the consequences of the entry of literature into an aesthetic regime, and more broadly reveals the need to rethink literature and to teach it as a specific modality of aesthetic experience.