A linguistic fallacy

Abstract

Another attempt at literary exogamy envisages a union of literary criticism and linguistics, with the latter as the dominant partner and the master model for conduct. The appropriateness of such a relationship, at least in a more egalitarian form, is in fact implied by the crucial distinction the folklorists draw attention to between oral and literate culture, suggesting a linguistic, not excluding sociolinguistic, study. But we have also stressed the importance of locating the difference between individualistic and collective, or folk, art in order to show that the shift in interest from plot to medium is not simply an historical development, as it might appear when we describe the detective story as a predecessor of the nouveau roman or even of the Jamesian game, while of course the species is not extinct. As Barthes explains this shift in the context of poetry, the content of all lyrical poetry could be crudely paraphrased as ‘Love’ and ‘Death’,¹ which in turn means that with the ‘signified’ determined by the genre, the only possibility of originality lies with the ‘signifier’. With these terms we are, however, already in the domain of linguistics.