Literariness, consensus, or "Something Else"

This essay suggests that widely different critical gazes “create” literature as their own object of study. In this sense literature is an “interminable object”. Neither the Canon, nor Formalist “literariness” can provide a complete definition of literature. Its specificity is not determined purely by consensus, nor by intrinsic formal devices, but within and beyond both, by the cognitive effects that are proper to it (including the fact that literature is a discourse which can be interrogated according to different perspectives, and keep several meanings open at the same time).