Spivak and Sontag: Deconstructing Borders Through a Critical Appraisal of Literature

As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak underlines in her Death of a Discipline (2003), the study of literature in academic contexts needs to be reconsidered in all its complex dynamics and aspects, overcoming the plurality of perspectives respectively given by Cultural Studies, Area Studies and Comparative Literature. By encouraging the analysis of any literary text through ‘close reading’ techniques, Spivak aims not only to deal with disciplinary borders, but also to overcome the geo-political and cultural frontiers in favour of a vision in which any literary text is acknowledged and recognized in its linguistic and thematic complexity. In the present chapter, I intend to show that the body is central in this process as the act of reading enables a form of communication which is based upon a double process of embodiment and disembodiment. More precisely, by focussing on the relationship between the author and the reader with the literary texts, I would argue that the act of reading coincides with the attempt of overcoming the general concept of border. To this extent, by adopting a philosophical and literary perspective, I will analyse some Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s works in association with some passages of Susan Sontag’s private diaries.