Goodbye, literature: a walk thought the museum (from Harald Szeemann to Cesar Aira and Paul Valéry)

Abstract

The essay seeks to show that there are tensions between the literary space and the exhibition space that occur through the autonomization and devaluation of literature itself throughout its history (MARX, 2005). However, the museum has a fictional, narrative dimension with collective and individual mythologies that, in part, is linked to the emergence of the curator’s status. This fact will have an effect on literary studies and the expansion of its field (KRAUS, 1979; PERLOFF, 1995). Thus, William Marx (contextualizing the Farewell to the continental literature), Paul Valéry (in his founding text on the museums and Monsieur Teste), Marcel Broodthaers (the passage of the poet to the artist and an attribution to the value of exposition of authors of “Goodbye, Literature”), Harald Szeemann (precursor of professional status, curating, as we know it), Georges Didi-Huberman (the one who somehow realized in books what for Szeemann was object of exhibition in museums and galleries), César Aira (reader of Marcel Duchamp) are some authors-artists-essayists of different conceptions of exhibition espace that help us to redefine literary studies in the context of exhibitions on the XX century.