This essay offers a critical review of the different stages along the elaboration of a theory, a methodology and a canon for what we nowadays call literary studies. Thus, the first step of this journey consists on the recording of the sources of this path which appears, as a symptom of modernity, during the first half of the 19th century. As we carry on with our analysis –second step–, the problems –oftentimes antithesis– which can be appreciated in the coined categories is shown from different

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... angles. The third step –the decisive one– stems from an attempt to evaluate critically this course as well as the discovery of certain openings that, in ouropinion, host the magisterial lessons of a theoretical thinking that seems to have stagnated from the second half of the 20th century onwards. The title "Counterpoint" illustrates the character bothantithetical and synthetic of our topic.