What is the Modernist Text?

This chapter takes its cue from the poststructuralist turn in our approach to lit-erature, which relativised the roles of writer, reader, and critic, to argue that these three roles are woven into the search for another thought that actually runs like a fil rouge through the twentieth century. The chapter details the search for what Rovatti and other proponents of pensiero debole have called “a different style of knowing”, relying on non-Anglophone voices (Ortega y Gasset, Zambra-no) that expand our view of modernism, showing that the pursuit is intimately connected with aesthetic modernism. Discussion illustrates how modernist con-cerns, especially the divergence of knowledge from thinking, have shaped the poststructuralist notion of the Text. Key modernist writers like H.D. and T. S. El-iot, who aimed at the recovery of an auroral astonishment, are paired with later theorists (Schürmann and Kristeva) to propose that the poststructuralist notions of the Text, of its floating nature, its vocation for disorienting the Law (Barthes) and its otherness (Kristeva) guard, curate, and transform the legacy of modern-ism.