Huy Vo

“...a fellow who undertakes to construct a work’s literary history has simultaneously to ask, as his absolute point of departure, what allows him to consider a literary work as literary, when it is in fact acknowledged by history, when it is in fact a cultural phenomenon, on the one hand. On the other, he should ask what allows him to perform his function as a critic. He should ask himself what the fact that he is able to speak about it as a critic represents from the cultural point of view and what it represents in his relationship to the aesthetic object that he will judge and elaborate.”
― Louis Althusser, History and Imperialism: Writings, 1963-1986

“If you want to construct a history of literature, you have to construct a history of what was intended to be literary but miscarried as literary, on the one hand, and you have simultaneously to construct a history of what was produced and has succeeded, but has not received the benediction of literature and isn’t considered literary (it can have been intended as literary or intended as non-literary by its authors).”
― Louis Althusser, History and Imperialism: Writings, 1963-1986

“All literary history is necessarily accompanied by an ideology of the aesthetic, a latent or explicit ideology that is its obligatory complement. There isn’t a single literary historian who doesn’t, at some point, come to a halt before the aesthetic nature of the work of art as if before something sacred, [in order to] sketch a theory of it, whether he’s a Platonist or a Hegelian or what have you.”
― Louis Althusser, History and Imperialism: Writings, 1963-1986

“Constructing literary history implies the possibility of constructing a history of non-literature. Not only works of art that have been completely forgotten by history, or destroyed, but also works that have been received by history as non-literary, all the sub-production that is considered non-literary.”
― Louis Althusser, History and Imperialism: Writings, 1963-1986