Literary history is, by its nature, qualified to give meaning to the texts written in the past. However, it is impossible to lend meaning to these texts in the absence of an integral, and scientific, identity. The post-modern awareness of the dispersion of identity should therefore dictate a shift in the focus of observation – literary history can no longer focus on a text and its (incessantly changing) meaning, but on the subject of utterance and on the subject's discourse determinable in space and time. This is the key which enables us to view the history of literature as a road traveled by the word signaling human existence through history, which has mainly been constituted as the changing awareness about the relationship between the word and the reality which it should describe.
