Literature as discursive interstice

Starting with a famously popular case of literary genesis, which is the rewriting of the theatre play English Without a Teacher in the new variant of The Bald Soprano, this paper aims at analysing the complex relationship between textual objects of literary pretension and the literary space. The paper’s assumed perspective derives from the pragmatics of literary discourse (cf. Maingueneau, 2007), while at the same time it is concerned with analysing the processual features of literary phenomena. It seems that these features can only be analysed in relation to the metamorphoses of the social and cultural imaginary. Emphasizing these relational features of the notion of literature across history and also emphasizing the capacity of literature to remain in a process of continual metamorphosis while being in close contact with the textual objects which seek to challenge its stability, and at the same time, emphasizing the status of literature as ‘discursive interstice’ or as ‘self-constituting discourse’, the paper sets out to show the fact that textual objects which aim at transgressing the ‘literary space’ are in fact the signals released from the pressure history and the cultural metamorphoses it has generated exercises on the literary phenomenon. This pressure seems to have offered literature a transgressive dimension.