Good-bye to literary criticism

The intention to assign literary criticism a proper status scientific or not - has deeply marked the critical ideals of the 20th century. In this essay the implications of such standpoint are discussed, as well as the possibilities (or impossibilities) of grounding them on sound epistemological bases. At the same time, we propose the idea that criticism is inexorably contaminated by its object in the action of dealing with it, thus becoming a form of "fiction" itself, whose statutes can not be searched outside literature, in methodologies that intend to be exempt of that contamination.