Abstract: Humanities’ loss of symbolic status and, most especially, literature’s loss of symbolic status have, in the last decades, been stated, and frequently overstated. The pessimistic position is to consider that there will be no way back – as if we were at the famous “end of history” that Fukuyama thought to have foreseen with the end of the Berlin wall and the pivotal historical moment lived in its wake. I propose to look at this question with a deeper historical insight, taking into consideration that status (either gained or lost) is always a matter of perspective, of position, and of the nature of the encyclopedia that we as observers and readers culturally tackle. I therefore discuss the nature of the supposed loss of status, to underline that it is an heritage of the understanding of literature as first and foremost an expression of a nation. If we take alternative stances, however, the nature of the question we are discussing interestingly differs. I then proceed to discuss “forms of belonging” as crucial to the understanding of the symbolic nature of literature and the Humanities, by stressing that losses are always transformations; that we should take into account the distinction between knowledge and cultural capital (Jeffrey Adams); and that we are surrounded by practical fields in which this distinction and its consequences are played for us to understand them. In my view, then, we should relativise all the “ends” and “deaths” that have plagued our field, which have led to the idea that literature is condemned to be just a cultural and symbolic loss, or marker of a doomed past.

Key words: symbolic value of literature, literature and nation, end of literature