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To study "literariness" and not literature: that is the formula which, fifty years ago, signaled the appearance of the first modern tendency in literary studies, Russian Formalism. This formula of Jakobson sought to redefine the object of research; however, for a long time there has been a mistake about its true significance. For it did not aim to substitute an inherent study for the transcendent approach (psychological, sociological, or philosophical) which ruled until then: in any event, one is not limited to the description of a work, which would not be the objective of a science (and it is with a science that we are concerned). It would be more just to say that in lieu of projecting the work onto another type of discourse, it is projected onto literary discourse itself. One studies not the work but the virtualities of literary discourse, which make it possible: literary studies therefore can become a science of literature.
Sense and Interpretati on. Just as to know language one must first study languages, to grasp literary discourse we must know it in concrete works. A problem appears here: how to select among the many significations which arise in the course of reading those which deal with literariness? How does one isolate the domain of that which is properly literary, leaving to psychology and history what is theirs? To facilitate this business of description, we are proposing to define two preliminary concepts, the sense and the interpretation.
The sense (or function) of an element of the work is its potential to enter into correlation with other elements of this work and with the entire work.1 The sense of a metaphor comes from being opposed to another image or from being more intense by one or several degrees. The sense of a monologue occurs from its characterizing a person. Flaubert was thinking of the sense of the elements of the work when he wrote: "There is no instance in my book of an isolated, gratuitous description; everything serves my characters and has an influence remote or immediate on the action." Each element of a work has one or more senses (unless it is deficient) which are finite in number and which it is possible to establish once and for all.