In the last decade, new digital technologies have fostered an unprecedented boom in research on the various facets of textuality. The possibility of the free exchange of ideas among equals, envisioned by the Enlightenment, seems ever closer, but at the same time, numerous questions remain regarding authorship, the transformation of the reader, and the future of the book as a privileged tool for cultural transmission. This context compels us to reconsider some of the certainties that shaped traditional thinking about texts and, above all, allows us to recover relatively marginal historical elements that, nevertheless, constitute an important source of analytical tools. In What is a Text?, four leading experts in cultural history (Roger Chartier, Fernando Bouza, Pedro M. Cátedra y Antonio Rodriguez de las Heras) examine in different areas – from classic debates on copyright to the digital book – some of the conceptual problems related to written culture.

Interview with Roger Chartier in the magazine Minerva