ABSTRACT
If one does not apply the techniques of linguistic description directly to the language of literature, how can one make use of linguistics in criticism? Barthes has observed that ‘structuralism has emerged from linguistics and in literature it finds an object which has itself emerged from language’, but how does this ‘emergence’ affect the relationship between the study of language and the study of literature? Barthes’s reply is decidedly ambiguous: on the one hand, he suggests that ‘at every level, be it that of the argument, the discourse or the words, the literary work offers structuralism the picture of a structure perfectly homological with that of language itself ’; yet on the other hand he sees structuralism as an attempt ‘to found a science of literature, or, to be more exact, a linguistics of discourse whose object is the “language” of literary forms, grasped at many levels’ (‘Science versus literature’, pp. 897-8).
