Literariness outside literature (La literariedad fuera de la

literatura)

The model for historical intelligibility, in short, is

literary narrative.

El modelo para su comprensión histórica, en síntesis, es

la literatura narrativa.

We who hear and read stories are good at telling

whether a plot makes sense, hangs together, or whether
the story remains unfinished.

Nosotros, los que estamos adiestrados en escuchar y leer

relatos, podemos precisar si un fragmento tiene sentido,
está bien entramado o si la narración ha concluido sin
un final.

If the same models of what makes sense and what

counts as a story characterize both literary and historical
narratives, then distinguishing between them need not
seem an urgent theoretical matter.

Si tanto los esquemas de lo que se relata objetivamente

como de lo que se relata ficcionalmente son
simultáneamente característicos de las narrativas
históricas y de la literatura, entonces establecer una
diferencia entre ellas no se presenta como una
apremiante problemática teórica.

Similarly, theorists have come to insist on the

importance in non-literary texts –whether Freud’s
accounts of his psychoanalytic cases or works of
philosophical argument– of rhetorical devices such as
metaphor, which have been thought crucial to literature
but have often been considered purely ornamental in
other sorts of discourses.

Asimismo los teóricos no dejan de insistir en la

importancia en los textos no literarios –sean los
informes de Freud sobre sus casos psicoanalíticos o las
obras de debate filosófico- de las figuras retóricas como
la metáfora, que han sido juzgadas fundamentales para
la literatura,

In showing how rhetorical figures shape thought in

other discourses as well, theorists demonstrate a
powerful literariness at work in supposedly non-literary
texts, thus complicating the distinction between the
literary and the non-literary.