ABSTRACT
In this passage, which occurs toward the end of his essay ‘History or literature?’, Barthes prepares the ground for finally specifying the distinction between two approaches to literature which it had been his concern, in the preceding pages, to disentangle: the history of literature, concerned with literature as an institution, and criticism, concerned with literature as a creation. With regard to the former, Barthes argues that literary history, properly conceived and executed, should concern itself with the examination of literary functions-of production, communication, consumption-and their determining institutional conditions. ‘In other words,’ as he puts it, ‘literary history is possible only if it becomes sociological, if it is concerned with activities and institutions, not with individuals.’2 When posed in this wayhistorically, institutionally, functionally-the question of
literature’s being is radically transformed. For a historical ontology literature, Barthes contends, dissolves its object. ‘Now literature very being,’ he writes, ‘when restored to history, is no longer a being.’3 Its place is occupied by a series of dispersed and historically variable functions which exceed the compass of any and all conceptions of literature as an eternity imbued with an unchanging being of its own. From the point of view of these concerns, the study of literature becomes ‘the study of techniques, rules, rites and collective mentalities’.4
