The article addresses a historical state of the art concerning the French literary studies, stressing its main trends and authors: the Geneva school approach, that conceived the critical act as encounter between the critical conscience and the creative project; the Sartre proposal to explain features of the literary works through social and psychological constraints; L. Goldmann's genetic structuralism, whose explaining concept about literature was the social group; the theory of literary forms which intended to isolate the text as form from its context; the genetic criticism, focusing the dynamics of the creative process based in the study of manuscripts; Bourdieu's theory of literary field, that recovers the autonomy of literature as a social fact embedded within the internal design and logic of the field.
Literary studies in France; Positivism; Genetic structuralism; Textual analysis; Literary field