‘Language, with its problems, mysteries and implications,’ wrote Terry Eagleton in the early 1980s, ‘has become both paradigm and obsession for twentieth century intellectual life.’1   Whether true or not in other fields of intellectual endeavour, this comment is certainly accurate in the case of the theory of literature.  Linguistics and language theory exerted an immense influence on literary theory and criticism in the closing decades of the twentieth century and although the first flush of enthusiasm may now have abated, there is every sign that, directly or indirectly, the influence will continue for some time to come.  The impact of linguistics and language theory can be clearly seen in two of the most prominent literary theories of the second half of the twentieth century – structuralism and poststructuralism.  As Jonathan Culler comments, ‘In simplest terms, structuralists take linguistics as a model and attempt to develop “grammars” - systematic inventories of elements and their possibilities of combination - that would account for the form and meaning of literary works.’2   Poststructuralism, as manifest, for example, in the work of Jacques Derrida and a number of deconstructionist theorists, shows much less interest in the idea of stable entities such as ‘grammars’ of literary works, but is nonetheless heavily indebted to language theory for its basic orientation.  As one commentator notes in describing Derrida’s response to the linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, ‘Derrida makes it clear that structuralism, whatever its conceptual limits, was a necessary stage on the way to deconstruction.  Saussure set the terms for a development which passed beyond the grasp of his explicit programme but which could hardly have been formulated otherwise.’3   Blended with other ideas, the influence of language theory is often evident in other well-known contemporary theoretical positions such as Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, some forms of poststructuralist feminist criticism, and even, despite its opposition to aspects of poststructuralism, in new historicist theory.4   In short, the concept of language has been a major element in contemporary thinking about the nature and purposes of literature, and has influenced many literary theorists powerfully and unmistakably.

The following discussion will examine the validity of this general approach to literature.  It will look beneath the specifics of the particular literary theories that language theory has influenced and consider the underlying proposition on which, in their different ways, these theories depend - the claim that literature can be validly conceptualised as a manifestation of language, and that ideas derived from theories about language can provide the basis for fruitful study and analysis of literary works.  The discussion will attempt to assess the strength of these claims.  It will ask, in effect, if language is able to serve as a ‘paradigm’ for the study of literature - to borrow Eagleton’s term - or whether, on the contrary, there is reason to suspect that this fundamental claim of much contemporary literary theory may in fact be seriously flawed.

The issue at stake, it should be stressed, is not simply whether it is possible to discuss literature in terms of concepts derived from theories about language.  Literature has been discussed in terms of a wide variety of conceptual frameworks, ranging from psychoanalytic theory, to Marxism, to mythology, to notions of pure form - to name just a few.  The crucial question is, as it is in all such cases, whether the analysis is valuable and relevant - that is, whether one can demonstrate that theories about how language operates are likely to provide the basis for a fruitful and enlightening approach to literature, and not simply direct attention to matters of peripheral importance.  The question, in other words, is about the suitability of the analytical tools one has chosen - whether they are, or are not, well adapted to the task.

One might perhaps object that although this question clearly needs to be asked in the case of other theoretical perspectives, it is superfluous in this instance.  Literature, it might be argued, is not self-evidently a suitable object for analysis in terms of psychoanalytic theory, or Marxism, or mythology, or 'pure form', and the relevance of such approaches therefore needs to be justified; but literature is self-evidently constructed out of language and the relevance of language theory is therefore obvious.  Superficially attractive though it is, this proposition does not stand up to scrutiny.  Certainly, one can hardly deny that literature is constructed out of language (although the significance of other elements in the case of drama should not be forgotten); but one cannot simply assume that the nature and purpose of something is necessarily the same as the nature and purpose of the material from which it is constructed.  (To give a simple example, at the risk of labouring the obvious: the nature and purpose of a house is obviously not the same as the nature and purpose of the bricks and mortar from which it is built.)  If one accepts the possibility that the terms ‘language’ and ‘literature’ denote qualitatively different things - things different in kind - (and this possibility surely cannot be arbitrarily ruled out), one cannot take it for granted that a body of theory purporting to be relevant to the former will also be useful and enlightening for the latter.  The relevance of language theory to literature therefore needs to be demonstrated: it cannot simply be assumed.5

This basic point would not be worth raising if it were not so often ignored.  In fact, however, literary theorists have frequently tended to speak as if the relevance of language theory to the study of literature can simply be taken for granted.  Even when, exceptionally, attention is focussed on this point, it is seldom pursued in any depth.  In their book, Contemporary Literary Theory, Raman Selden and Peter Widdowson comment, for instance, that,

... it would be a mistake to identify ‘literature’ and ‘language’.  It is true that literature uses language as a medium, but this does not mean that the structure of literature is identical with the structure of language.  The units of literary structure do not coincide with those of language.

A further widespread weakness in theoretical approaches to literature derived from theories about language is the limited view taken of language theory itself.  Structuralism and poststructuralism, and theoretical writing influenced by these theories, tend to rely heavily on the thinking of Saussure as set out in the Cours de Linguistique Générale, Saussure providing either a model to draw on (in the case of structuralism) or a series of propositions to react against (in the case of poststructuralism).  Other language theorists are mentioned occasionally, but Saussure is without doubt the principal focus of interest.  Yet, even a quick survey of the field of language theory reveals a much more complex state of affairs than this suggests.  Differences in the fields of language theory and linguistics run very deep.  There are fundamental divergences between the account of language given in the Cours de Linguistique Générale and those found in (for example) Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures, John Searle’s Speech Acts, or Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.  To identify just one area of disagreement which these names suggest: Chomsky seeks to exclude meaning from those elements of language that he regards as fundamental; Saussure’s account, by contrast, gives central importance to the way he believes meaning is generated.  Such issues are fundamental to the view one takes of language and how it works.  Yet they are rarely mentioned, much less explored, in expositions of theories of literature that derive from language theory.  Reading such expositions, one can often be left with the impression that the Cours de Linguistique Générale represents a set of propositions to which linguists generally would assent.  This is simply not the case.  There is no doubt that Saussure is now regarded - with good reason - as a major figure in twentieth century linguistics but it would be quite mistaken to suggest that the Cours embodies a consensus of opinion among language theorists, or even (as Saussure himself would probably have agreed9) a comprehensive account of language.  The tendency to limit attention to Saussure is a serious and widespread shortcoming of language-oriented literary theory, including structuralist and poststructuralist theory.  To focus so strongly on Saussure is, despite the undeniable importance of his work, to approach the theory of language in a narrow, selective way that omits alternative viewpoints and obscures the very real and often fundamental disagreements among language theorists about the nature of language and how it works.

To compound the problem, the interpretations placed on the work of Saussure himself are often open to serious question.  One proposition frequently presented as a central idea in the Cours is that Saussure detaches language from the world of objects and events, and sees it as operating purely as a system of differences among its own elements.  In his book, Criticism and Literary Theory, 1890 to the Present, Christopher Baldick writes, for example, that:

In the structuralist tradition inaugurated by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure in his Cours de linguistique générale (1916), Language is disconnected from the things outside of itself that it talks about (its ‘referents’), and considered purely as a system of distinctions between and among its own elements (‘signs’).10

This essay argues that this general 'language-based' approach to literature has serious weaknesses at a fundamental level.

One immediate obstacle to this line of inquiry is that, as already noted, there are very few substantial claims about the nature of language that are likely to command broad agreement among linguists and that might therefore offer a generally acceptable foundation for the study of literature.  There is, nevertheless, some likelihood of consensus around two elementary propositions: first, that language operates on the basis of a system of rules; and second, that for any given language, this system is passed on from one generation of speakers to the next with very little change.  There would, of course, be major disagreement among linguists about the nature of the rule system - ranging, for instance, from a Chomsykan emphasis on the centrality of syntax, to schools of thought in which semantics is the key consideration.  The modest claim, however, that language is a rule system of some kind, which is handed on largely unchanged from one generation to the next, is likely to encounter relatively few dissenting voices.  The claim would also, one presumes, be likely to gain acceptance from many literary theorists who draw on language theory since both propositions are prominent in the source to which they mostly appeal - Saussure.  As is well known, Saussure draws a basic distinction between parole and langue, the former being the individual utterance in its infinite variety, and the latter, which is his own prime focus, being, in his words, ‘the whole set of linguistic habits which allow an individual to understand and be understood.’14   Saussure regards these ‘linguistic habits’ as a system of rules, describing them in terms such as a ‘mechanism’ or ‘the laws of language.’15   This system, he stresses, is highly resistant to change.  Unlike other conventional systems, such as religious rites or legal codes, which concern limited numbers of people for limited periods of their time, language, he argues, involves everyone all the time.  Change, when it occurs, is therefore very slow even when deliberate attempts are made to bring it about.16

Yet, while these two propositions may seem plausible enough in relation to language, they seem very odd and out of place when employed as tools for the study of literature.  The notion of resistance to change, firstly, sits very uncomfortably with the familiar view that essential features of successful and enduring literary creation are originality and a capacity to view the world in a fresh light.  For most literary critics - and indeed for the general reader - a work that breaks no new ground and merely repeats what has been done before is likely to be regarded as ‘hackneyed’, ‘stale’ or ‘cliché-ridden’.  Structuralist or poststructuralist theorists might perhaps respond, in keeping with a view they have sometimes advanced, that the perception of originality or creativity in a literary work is an illusion and that all literature is merely a reworking or ‘re-presentation’ of previous texts.  A classic statement of this view is Roland Barthes’ well-known comment in his essay ‘The Death of the Author’ that

a text is ... a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.  The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.  Similar to Bouvard and Pécuchet, those eternal copyists, at once sublime and comic and whose profound ridiculousness indicates precisely the truth of writing, the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original.  His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them...17

The proposition that language is a system of rules also runs into difficulties when applied to literature.  Though abandoned by poststructuralism, as noted earlier, this idea has been employed extensively by structuralists in their quest for the rules or ‘structures’ underlying literary works.  It is not proposed to comment here on any of these systems except to note that there are often substantial differences among them - a situation that is scarcely surprising given that language theorists themselves often hold fundamentally different views on what these rules might be.  It is worth noting, however, that the proposition that language is a system of rules has been used in a more general way to support language-oriented approaches to literary theory by arguing that it throws doubt on the possibility of any qualitative difference between literature and other forms of language (or ‘text’).  Terry Eagleton writes, for example, that

the structuralist method implicitly questioned literature’s claim to be a unique form of discourse: since deep structures could be dug out of Mickey Spillane as well as Sir Philip Sidney, and no doubt the same ones at that, it was no longer easy to assign literature an ontologically privileged status.18

Eagleton’s argument also falls into the trap, discussed earlier, of simply assuming the relevance of language theory to literature.  If in fact the ‘deep structures’ he refers to are derived from language, it would not be at all surprising to discover them in both Mickey Spillane and Sir Philip Sidney (to use his own examples), given that language is the medium both employ.  Indeed, it would perhaps be surprising if they were absent in either.  It would remain to be demonstrated, however, that these structures perform a valuable explanatory function for anything apart from purely linguistic features.  If it were the case that the concept of ‘literature’ identifies something qualitatively different from other uses of language (a possibility which, as noted earlier, cannot be arbitrarily ruled out) the work of Sir Philip Sidney might still be ‘ontologically’ different from that of Mickey Spillane, viewing both as literature, even though they shared the same deep structures.  Pursuing Eagleton’s own metaphor, the deep structures ‘dug out’ in each case might well be the same, but in one case might support a building of no particular distinction and in the other an architectural gem.

To summarise:  This section of the discussion has assumed, for the sake of argument, that concepts derived from language theory are able to offer suitable tools for the analysis of literature, and has then asked what the implications of this assumption might be.  An immediate difficulty, we have noted, is that very few propositions of substance about language are likely to gain general support from the different schools of thought in language theory.  The analysis has, however, selected two elementary propositions that seem likely to gain fairly wide acceptance and then tested their usefulness and appropriateness in relation to literature.  In the first case (the notion of resistance to change) the attempt leads to conclusions that seem manifestly incongruous and untenable.  The second case (language as a system of rules) encountered both the practical problem of identifying a system of rules that might command broad support, and the additional difficulty, once a rule system had been selected, of demonstrating that the structures derived from it would perform a valuable explanatory function for literature.  The result, in short, is not encouraging.  Far from allaying the concerns identified in the preceding section, the analysis seems to cast further doubt on the relevance of language theory to literature.

The Cours de Linguistique Générale, we recall, distinguishes between parole and langue, the former being a speaker’s specific utterances in their infinite variety, and the latter being ‘the whole set of linguistic habits that allow an individual to understand and be understood.’  This proposition is relatively uncontroversial.  Broadly speaking, an elementary distinction along these lines, between language conceived as a general system, and the specific utterances which are the system’s concrete manifestations, is common ground among many language theorists.20   Saussure’s definition of langue also suggests that, viewed as a system, language can be viewed as a process of naming phenomena (the ‘understanding’ of them) as well as the use of this ability to communicate with others (the capacity to ‘be understood’).  This analysis is also likely to find substantial support among language theorists.  The relative importance of the two functions (naming and communication), and the question of how they operate, would undoubtedly be matters of lively debate, but generally speaking there is likely to be little dissent from the relatively modest claim that a language enables members of a language community to ‘understand’ - or ‘make sense of’ - the phenomena of experience through a capacity to name them, and then to use this capacity to convey information about those phenomena to others.

Formulated in this way, however, the idea of language is highly abstract: language is here presented as a general concept not as specific utterance.  In Saussure’s terms, it is langue not parole.  If one accepts, as suggested above, that one of the basic functions of language is to ‘have names’ for the phenomena of experience, how might this naming process manifest itself in concrete terms when one begins to consider language as utterance - that is, as a practical, working instrument?  Choosing an example at random, one might suggest that the English word ‘love’, for instance, is the ‘name’ given to an experience of strong attraction and affection.  At first glance this seems a satisfactory response.  The word ‘love’ does in fact ‘name’ such an experience (or, stating the matter more conventionally, the definition identifies what the word ‘love’ means).  The movement from abstract idea to concrete process seems to have been accomplished without difficulty.  Yet, on reflection, it is clear that this has been achieved by relying simply on a kind of ‘dictionary definition’ of love.  Purely by itself - that is, if nothing further could be said - the formulation provides only the most meagre indication of the range of meanings and connotations contained in the word ‘love’ for a fluent speaker of the English language.  By itself, the formulation is much less a satisfactory description of what the word ‘names’ than a kind of signpost pointing in the general direction of its range of potential meanings.  One might, then, seek to remedy this deficiency by supplementing the description with a paragraph explaining the meaning of love at greater length.  But will even this be enough?  There is, after all, love between man and woman, maternal love, love of God, love of one’s country - and these do not exhaust the list.  Will the expanded explanation adequately convey the meanings of all these?  And within each one, there are further differences.  Love between man and woman can be mainly physical desire; it can be platonic; it can superficial; or it can be so passionate and profound that the lovers would willingly die for each other.  These are all experiences that the word ‘love’ can quite properly name, but even expanding the original, brief definition as we now have, the nature of the experiences is still only indicated in the most summary and rudimentary way.  The movement from the abstract idea of ‘naming’ to the concrete process is, it begins to appear, a much more substantial and demanding task than one first thought, and as this example shows, is achieved only in the most cursory way by a mere ‘dictionary definition’.21

One might perhaps object that although a brief definition of ‘love’ such as ‘strong attraction and affection’ does not capture the full range and depth of the experiences to which the word refers, it does describe the common core of those experiences - their ‘common denominator’, so to speak.  This comment may be true, but in the present context it puts the analytical cart squarely before the horse because it proceeds from the assumption that ‘love’ has already accumulated the multiple meanings for which the definition claims to offer the common core, without explaining how this has come about.  One might then reply that the particular meaning of a word such as love will usually be explained by its context.  Again, this is true, but far from countering the argument being advanced here, it simply confirms it.  The key point that the above analysis highlights is that all words (‘love’ is simply a convenient example) depend vitally on their contexts (a dictionary entry itself being just one elementary kind of context) for the meanings they acquire - for their capacity to ‘name’ something with accuracy and precision.  And the argument clearly suggests that the richer and the more developed the context, the clearer and the more effective the ‘naming’ process will be - the richest contexts evidently being those which provide the strongest and most explicit illustration of the experience to which the word refers.  This conclusion surely points ultimately in the direction of literature.  In the case of love between man and woman, for example, it might point to works such as Romeo and Juliet, Pride and Prejudice, or Lady Chatterly's Lover (each of which gives a different significance to the idea of love), and to countless other, lesser-known works, including long-forgotten tales stretching back to the earliest years of the language.  Such rich and varied contexts stand at one end of a spectrum in which the meagre - though obviously useful - phrases provided in dictionary entries represent the opposite end.  They provide the means through which language, conceived as a working instrument, not merely as abstraction, is able to ‘name’ the constituents of experience clearly, powerfully and in their full depth and variety.

The point at issue here can easily be obscured by the vague, if widespread, belief that any given word simply ‘has’ a meaning, and that its meaning attaches to it quite naturally, independently of its context.  This view does not stand up to scrutiny.  Firstly, it is at odds with the everyday observation that many words taken in isolation can have more than one meaning.  (What does the word ‘ball’ mean by itself?)  More importantly, the notion of a single word existing without any context is, strictly speaking, self-contradictory and virtually unthinkable since, to the extent that a word retains any meaning at all - to the extent that it is a ‘word’- it must exist within a universe of other words, which will necessarily give it some vestige of sense no matter how far removed from them it may physically be.  (A word such as ‘love’ or ‘God’ - or even a word as neutral as ‘of’, for example - standing by itself on a blank page is not meaningless because it can still be mentally referred to the universe of other English words in which it plays its part.  But the notion of there being just one word in a ‘language’ in which no other words exist is incoherent.)

One might argue, nevertheless, that, even granting that some form of context is necessary and inevitable, a word’s meaning is most accurately and appropriately revealed in a ‘neutral’ context (separated, for example, from the ‘emotive’ atmosphere of literature) in which all words simply possess and express their ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ meanings.  The notion of such a context is, however, an illusion.  What, after all, would a neutral context be like?  ‘Everyday usage’ is far too imprecise an answer, and in fact mostly consists of contexts that are not neutral at all.  (Is a quarrel a neutral context?  Or an expression of affection, impatience, boredom, happiness, annoyance, pleasure, or disgust? - just to give a few random examples of the common ingredients of ‘everyday’ communication.)  The contexts that most closely approximate this condition - where words are drained as far as possible of any ‘emotive’ content - are probably areas such as commerce or the bureaucracy.  The common characteristic of language in these cases is not, however, that words take on their ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ meanings (commercial and bureaucratic styles tend notoriously to be considered abnormal and unnatural) but rather that they become mechanical and lifeless.  In the light of what has been said, this is surely not surprising.  As argued above, the extent to which words convey their meanings clearly and powerfully is dependent on the extent to which the experience they name is most accurately and forcefully realised.  This calls for the very reverse of a neutral (or non-existent) context.  It requires one in which all the expressive resources of language are deployed to the maximum - a context rarely characteristic of commercial or bureaucratic communications but a key aim of imaginative literature.

These observations run directly counter to a strong current in recent literary theory which holds that, with its frequent use of figures of speech (or ‘tropes’), literature is especially vulnerable to the uncertainty or ‘undecidability’ of meaning which, at least in the view of some poststructuralists, is inherent in all texts.22   As Selden and Widdowson comment in discussing Paul de Man’s Allegories of Reading, ‘Tropes pervade language, exerting a force which destabilises logic, and thereby denies the possibility of a straightforwardly literal or referential use of language.’  All language is therefore ‘contaminated by figurality’,23 and literature particularly so.  This widely influential line of argument derives its force from the implied assumption that there exists - ideally at least - a transparently clear form of language which would emerge in a neutral context in which all ‘figurality’ had been removed.  As we have seen, however, a context of complete neutrality is in fact unimaginable since words inevitably exist in a universe of other words; and to the limited extent that neutrality can be realised - for example in the language of commerce or the bureaucracy - it leads not to clarity and transparency but to a desiccated, lifeless form of language.  The suggestion that a ‘straightforwardly literal or referential use of language’ is an ideal to which language might aspire is therefore misleading because it effectively turns on its head the process through which words acquire meaning.  It is precisely in a context where language is able to make full and unfettered use of all its resources - including its ‘tropes’ - to capture the nature and form of human experience (literature being the obvious context) that it achieves its greatest power and precision.  Far from representing ‘contamination’, so-called ‘figurality’ is a vital instrument in the development and maintenance of language’s vitality, accuracy, and fullness of meaning.

These arguments strongly suggest that language should be viewed as a two-dimensional phenomenon (as it is in Saussure’s own langue/parole contrast) that functions on different, but mutually dependent, planes.  Stated in general terms, the function of language is, one might agree, to ‘make sense of’ the phenomena of experience, as Saussure suggests - that is, to have ‘names’ for objects and events.  Formulated in this way, however, the concept of language remains, as we have said, an abstraction, an idea  - in effect, an unrealised capacity or potentiality.24 In practice, language is a working instrument - a living body of words, and ways of using them.  Language in this sense depends for its force and clarity on the development of language contexts in which the concepts or experiences that words ‘name’ are powerfully realised and where, by consequence, words are charged with meaning.  This dimension of language is not fully captured, one should perhaps add, by Saussure’s concept of parole.  As Saussure employs it, this concept involves no inner dynamic of its own but is simply used to denote the individual acts of speaking or writing which are the realisation of langue.  Saussure’s idea is essentially passive: it registers the fact that the actualisation of langue will take the form of an infinite variety of different utterances, but goes no further than this.  While this may be a perfectly adequate formulation viewing the matter from the perspective of langue - which is, after all,  Saussure’s perspective - it gives only a partial view.  If the arguments presented above are correct, the actualisation of language, seen as a process in itself, does involve an inner dynamic - a dynamic that responds to the need to give vitality and fullness of meaning to language, and which is driven ultimately by literature.  This proposition goes well beyond Saussure’s notion of parole.

Terry Eagleton’s comment, quoted in the introduction to this essay, that the concept of language ‘has become both paradigm and obsession’ is perhaps even more apt than it first appears.  The impact of language theory on literary theory (and criticism) has been immense, as Eagleton implies, but, as the word ‘obsession’ suggests, the enthusiasm to embrace the approach has perhaps not always been matched by a readiness to subject it to careful scrutiny.  Very frequently, as noted early in this discussion, there has been a tendency simply to assume that language theory is able to offer a genuinely enlightening account of literature.  Frequently also, the treatment of language theory has been narrowly focused and superficial - surprisingly so, given that the initial impetus for this approach to literature seems often to have been a desire to develop a more systematic and rigorous methodology than had previously been employed.  As we have seen, language theory is in reality anything but a unified body of agreed principles, and even those propositions that do seem likely to gain some measure of general acceptance (such as language’s resistance to change, and its reliance on a system of rules) prove to be of very questionable value when applied to literature.

This is not to make the blanket assessment that language theory and linguistics have nothing to offer the study of literature.  The valuable contributions of philology are alone enough to caution against that conclusion.  The analysis does, however, call into question many of the uses to which language theory - or interpretations of it - has been put in recent decades, particularly by structuralism, poststructuralism, and theories influenced by them.  If the analysis presented here is correct, a basic error has been to employ the concept of language as an abstraction (as it usually is in language theory) to provide an account of language in its concrete actuality.  In terms of Saussure’s categories of langue and parole, the focus has been on the wrong side of the divide.  The arguments presented here suggest that as a living body of words endowed with expressive power and precision, language has little more than a phantom presence when viewed from the perspective of language theory.  In this concrete, ‘actualised’ sense, language ultimately derives its substance and vitality from the sustaining, creative power of literature.  This is not to suggest any hierarchy of importance between the abstract concept of language and its concrete realisation.  It does however imply a fundamental difference in kind between the two.  The uses to which literary theory has put the concept of language in recent decades have too frequently ignored this difference and to that extent have, it seems, led the theoretical and practical study of literature down a blind alley.
 

1.  Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, (Oxford University Press, 1983), 97.
2.  Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction, (Ithaca New York: Cornell University Press, 1982), 22.
3.  Christopher Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice, (London: Routledge, 1982), 30,31.
4.  See for example: Claire Colebrook, New Literary Histories, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 222-227.
5.  It is important to note that the proposition being advanced here is not dependent on prior definition of either language or literature.  It simply requires acceptance of the possibility that the terms may describe qualitatively different entities - a possibility which, as indicated, one can scarcely exclude arbitrarily.
6.  Raman Selden and Peter Widdowson, Contemporary Literary Theory (Third Edition), (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), 109.
7.  A ball bearing and the moon are both solid spheres but still differ in ways which could properly be described as fundamental.  There are many other such examples.
8.  Not surprisingly, the issue at stake here is not pursued further in Selden and Widdowson’s discussion.  Other sources where one might expect the issue to be addressed, but where it is either absent or skirted around, include: Chris Baldick, Criticism and Literary Theory, 1890 to the Present, (London: Longman 1996), 163-177; Howard Felperin, Beyond Deconstruction, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), (Chapters 2 and 3); Terry Eagleton, op. cit., (where the issue is blurred by confusing ‘language’ and ‘ordinary language’ - see Introduction); Christopher Norris, op. cit.; Jonathan Culler, op. cit.; Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), (Chapters 4 and 5).
9.  See the following remark in the Preface to the First Edition of the Cours: ‘In his teaching [Saussure] never pretended to examine all parts of linguistics or to devote the same attention to each of those examined.’  Ferdinand de Saussure: Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin, (New York: McGraw-Hill, Paperback Edition, 1966), xv.  All quotations from the Cours are from this source.
10.  Chris Baldick, op. cit., 163.
11.  Terry Eagleton, op. cit., 109.
12.  This point has been made very effectively by John Ellis who also argues that the claim is in any case incoherent.  See John Ellis, Against Deconstruction, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 47-49.
13.  The statement by Saussure that is most commonly quoted in support of this interpretation is: ‘in language there are only differences without positive terms’.  But the context of this statement in the Cours provides no support for the view that it is intended to imply that language is detached from the world of things and events.  The statement is simply a summary of Saussure’s explanation of the way words generate meaning.  See the Course in General Linguistics, 120.
14.  Course in General Linguistics, 77.
15.  Ibid, 65-78.
16.  Ibid, 73,74.
17.  Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image, Music, Text, (Fontana/Collins, 1977), 146.
18.  Terry Eagleton, op. cit. 107.
19.  The same reasoning applies to terms such as ‘analogies’ or ‘special relationships’ used by Selden and Widdowson in the extracts quoted earlier.  A rule system ‘analogous’ to Chomsky’s notion of syntax, or which had a ‘special relationship’ to it, would presumably differ substantially from one which was linked in these ways to the kinds of rule systems that might be based on speech act theory or on Saussure.  (The rule systems or ‘structures’ of literature might of course be said to derive from sources other than language but that proposition is beyond the scope of the present essay.)
20.  A not dissimilar distinction between ‘competence’ and ‘performance’ has been made in the context of Chomskyan linguistics, for example.
21.  The main exceptions to this would probably be very specialist or technical terms for which a dictionary definition might sometimes be able to provide a completely adequate explanation.  (It should perhaps be added that although the argument here uses the example of a word denoting an experience (love), the principle at stake applies to words of all kinds, including those denoting objects, events, or concepts.)
22.  This point has been discussed briefly above.
23.  Raman Selden and Peter Widdowson, op. cit., 151,152.
24.  Interestingly, Saussure himself uses the notion of potentiality in one description of langue calling it a ‘grammatical system that has a potential existence in each brain, or, more specifically, in the brains of a group of individuals’. Course in General Linguistics, 13,14.