Genetic Criticism and Its Myths

Abstract

Is it possible to conceive of a science of origins in literature-not at all in the Darwinian sense of a genealogy of literary species but, rather, in the sense intended by Valery of a study of literary creation rendered scientific by new methods? That is the question that genetic criticism has posed over the past few years. For my part, it is from the outside-from the perspective, let us say, of a hermeneuticist or even a phenomenologist of literature-that I would like to consider how genetic criticism has established itself as a discipline, institutionally as well as theoretically.