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In certain disciplines there is no big temporal gap between the old problems and the new ones: old questions may elicit reactions pertaining to the very present. Natural and human sciences differ in the respect that their relation to their own history is different. In the humanities, cultivating „history of the sciences” is in fact not at all a historical study: that is, it is not an analysis of closed, completed periods but rather raising, again, older questions. Marking off a turning point here is far from being an ever valid, impartial, objective act; naming a period (or an author, a work, a theory etc.) a turning point is, in fact, an activity by which we not only write (or re-write) the history of the human sciences but it also counts as a contribution to the scholarship of our own present; regarding something as a turning point is not so much a proposition of the turning point itself but rather refers to those who pronounce this sentence. I regard system theoretical approaches or schools as such a turning point and argue that it is not a story of the decay of Structuralism, its decomposition: the systemic approach to (or systems theory of) literature (or humanities in general) is, then, not in fact ready, completed, it could and should be put together from very precious spare parts; such an inquiry would posit the process of producing, mediating and consuming texts within the structure and history of society; it would contemplate texts as operating in a given system which has its own participants, agents having different functions, roles.

DOI: 10.4000/corela.4536

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