Literature and the Touch of the Real

Literature and the Touch of the Real offers a critique of neo-Saussurean theories of the constitution of the world through language or the essential divorce of language from the real. It does this by, first, offering a critical account of the contradictions and omissions of Saussure's Course in General Linguistics. Secondly, in a revisionist reading of Jacques Derrida, it argues that far from reducing reality to language, Derrida's concept of the text in fact argues that the world cannot be eradicated from the linguistic. Thirdly, it offers an account of Ludwig Wittgenstein's concepts of grammar, criteria, aspect perception, and language-games that reintegrates language and the world while avoiding the instrumentalist pitfalls of realism and empiricism.