The book and the possibility of the aesthetic event

Abstract

In the contemporary civilizational scenario, which is very much based on the culture of the immediate, often to the detriment of the human and humanist dimension, it becomes essential to provide habits and readings that can somehow contribute to the preservation, clarification, dissemination, and structuring of another memory, marked by reading and writing habits, by an awareness of the book as “source of the vitality of the spirit” (as George Steiner said), even if at the expense of resorting to hypertextual multivocalism. Knowing that neither Literature nor social conduct are static phenomena—and language, as Mikhaïl Bakhtine said, “vit et évolue historiquement dans la communication verbale concrète, non dans le système linguistique abstrait des formes de la langue, non plus que dans le psychisme individuel des locuteurs” (Bakhtine, 1977: 137; emphasis in original)—I will try to address, among other attached issues the need to grant confidence to the Humanities (and, in the specific case, to literature); the (absolute) necessity of the habit of writing and reading the literary text, in a universe increasingly marked by the new information and communication technologies that will polyphonically chromatize a digital culture with an interface dominated by the cybercultural and hypertextual power of webwriting and weblecture.