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 close reading of Derrida's early texts that the notorious statement "there is nothing beyond the text" does not claim that there is nothing outside of language. Rather, the broader context of this claim shows that the reduction of the world from language is in fact one of Derrida's earliest philosophical targets. By examining the polemics concerning the term "apartheid" and J.L. Austin's philosophy of speech acts, and Derrida's essays on the proper name in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and James Joyce, it argues that Derrida maintains a sophisticated and critical view of the relationship among words, concepts, and things in the world that may be related to Saul Kripke's "causal" theory of reference, developed within the analytical tradition of philosophy." "The book uses the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein to offer a renewed vision of the defamiliarizing power of literature. Literature, it argues, offers the kind of "grammatical investigation" with which Wittgenstein himself was concerned. It is grammar (in the specialist sense in which he uses the term) that tells us "what kind of object anything is" and the literary is the place where the coming together of language and the world is registered most fully. It uses the Wittgensteinian notions of "samples" and "criteria" to show that language is involved in the appropriation of aspects of the world through the historically contingent activities of linguistic practice, and it uses Wittgenstein's analysis of aspect perception to forge a new account of the ideological role of the literary and its relation to the real."--Jacket.