Chekhov’s Letter: Linguistic System and its Discontents

Abstract

In speaking here for language and literature (and I do speak, not »on« or »about,« but precisely for them: on their behalf and in their name) I face an impossible task. It is not just the vastness of the topic; there is also the enormous body of scholarship, either itself systems-theoretical or of a sort congenial to systems theory, dating back in Saussure and the Russian Formalists to the earliest decades of this century. Ideally I would present some kind of report summarizing views, methods, and findings, delineating common assumptions and problems, and hinting at profitable lines for future research. Yet given the dimensions of this paper, any such inevitably shorthand report is out of the question. I must take a quite different tack I shall of course name some of the most important names and say something of what they stand for. But my general method will be suggestive rather than descriptive, less a conventional exposé than a series of what Wittgenstein would call thinking-points. I shall present a thesis of sorts, grounded in the interpretation of a certain story; and the fact that I ground my remarks in the analysis of a particular literary text already tells you something about how we do things in my neck of the woods. But this thesis is meant to serve merely as an occasion, a place for thought; the actual work must come later, in your own subsequent musings on the points it raises.