The language of criticism

the long version

Jacqueline M. Henkel explores the impact of linguistics and ordinary language philosophy on literary theory over the past four decades. Her readings of key texts relocate the principal literary issues raised by the interaction between these fields. She shows how various linguistic models - among them Saussurean and Prague School linguistics, generative grammar, and speech-act theory - have affected such major movements in literary criticism as stylistics, Jakobsonian structuralism, narratology, reader-oriented criticism, and deconstruction and its offshoots. Among the major figures she discusses, in addition to Saussure and Jakobson, are Chomsky, Derrida, Austin, and Searle.