Literature and the touch of the real

"Literature and the Touch of the Real argues that Saussurean linguistic theory that has become the dominant view of language cannot sustain any kind of nonstructuralist analysis of literature. Criticism has moved increasingly toward history and politics, but it has neither forged nor adopted a philosophy of language suited to its new purposes. There is, therefore, pressure to bring to bear on literary and cultural studies a philosophy of language that will enable "literary criticism to make contact with the real," in Stephen Greenblatt's recent words, by showing how language grasps material reality through a process of practical consciousness and social activity." "The book offers a detailed account of the constitutive contradictions of Saussure's Course in General Linguistics that have been ignored by literary theorists. It argues that Derrida and Wittgenstein offer differently conceived, but related ways of avoiding both the neo-Saussurean view that language either is disconnected from the world or constitutes reality, on the other hand, and the neo-Realist view that literature and fiction are secondary, etiolated forms of language use, on the other. It demonstrates through a clo