Literary study and linguistics

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This paper is an attempt to explore once more the relationship between literary study and linguistics. We think such an attempt is useful in itself, and particularly called for on the Canadian literary and linguistic scene where the divorce between critics and linguists still seems to be fully in force. We hope to have something to say to those linguists who neither welcome nor wish to perpetuate the temporary tactical withdrawal from the domain of meaning which occurred some decades ago in North American linguistics. We also wish to reach those literary critics who do not rely exclusively on the cultivation of intuition and who do not refuse, as a matter of principle, the formulation of systematic and verifiable statements about their work. Both literary study and linguistics deal, to a very large extent, and in their most pertinent and most difficult aspects, with the same set of phenomena. There is no need here to trace the long history of the linguistics-literary study opposition. It is enough to say that this dichotomy represents the partial perpetuation of certain language-literature, science-art, form-content dualisms, and that in spite of its continuing acceptance in practice (sceptics are invited to glance at a few issues of Modern Language journals, or even at most of the University calendars), this dichotomy is neither necessary nor philosophically tenable.