Abstract
Literary Theory is not an autonomous discipline. The main proposition of this article falls within the context of the Traveling Theories project. Histories of Literary Theory in Brazil and its correlations with Latin America (1986-2000). It is about identifying and analyzing the devices for legitimizing changes and tensions between fields of force in the context of the Literary Theory discipline at a Brazilian university in the period of political redemocratization. The focus is on the tensions observed between Literary Theory understood in the new democratic environment as practices and ways of reading and theory committed to rejecting ethnocentrism in culture. This article demonstrates the preliminary results of the first two years of work with the project, in which was studied the institutionalization process of the discipline during the years 1996-2000 in the Literature courses at the University of São Paulo and the Federal University of Santa Catarina.
Keywords:
teaching literature; Literary Theory; Comparative Literature; reading; decolonization