LITERATURE AND THE CRISIS OF THE HUMANITIES AFTER POSTMODERNISM
LITERATURE AND THE CRISIS OF THE HUMANITIES AFTER POSTMODERNISM

Summary/Abstract: Re-reading Lyotard, the paper critically explores the legacy of postmodernism and poststructuralism, which, by demolishing the autonomy of humanistic knowledge and logocentricity, has led to a legitimacy crisis and the undermining of the sustainability of literature as an institution. By abandoning the idea of humanism as a civil ideology of anthropocentrism and Western hegemony, and by demolishing Humboldt’s university project, the University has opened up space for the new games of humanity on the road to the growing mercantilization of knowledge, loss of autonomy, and market networking. A special challenge is also the loss of the sign and the disappearance of the real (Baudrillard) in the society of the spectacle (Debord), which consequently leads to the crisis of artistic communication, the growing entropy (Arnheim) and the new décor of the inhuman (Lyotard). The key issue today is how to find ways to deconstruct the deconstruction project and return to the humanism in the humanities in academic studies and academic teaching of literature.

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