In post-Proposition 13 America, the most incendiary issue of the day is costeffective government. When the mayor of Chicago spends $90,000 for a snowremoval plan that leaves the denizens of his city buried under seven feet of snow, this is not cost-effective government. When the Pentagon spends one billion dollars on a sophisticated nuclear aircraft carrier the sole purpose of which is to keep itself from being blown out of the water, this is not cost-effective spending. And when the President asks the Navy for a concise statement of the environmental impact of Project Sanguine and receives in return a 1400-page tome of gobbledygook, this is not cost-effective writing. The public imagination has been captured by a fraction. This fraction is known in business terms as the cost/benefit ratio. Its guiding principle is the most-for-the-least: minimize expenditures while maximizing services. Such a ratio is sometimes computable in quantitative terms (e.g., dollars spent vs. inches of snow removed) and sometimes conceivable only in qualitative terms (e.g., human lives lost in an insurrection vs. acquisitions made in individual liberty). But the underlying figure of speech is still solidly based on the notion of a ratio, a comparison of two terms on one of two inductive psychological scales. My purpose is not to declare my candicacy for governor. My purpose is to define the literary analogue of a common-sense budgetary principle. The costfactor, or numerator of my literary ratio is the syntactic means deployed by a text. The benefit-factor, or denominator, is the semantic content delivered. The most advantageous ratio is obtained when the numerator is minimized and the denominator is simultaneously maximized. The concrete result is a compact, information-charged specimen-text: a mini-max poem, story or play. The abstract result is a certain style of text which I shall refer to as mini-max discourse. A few examples will quickly illustrate the intuitive validity of the idea. Samuel Beckett's later works (Happy Days, One-Act Play, and Breath) show what happens when the numerator becomes vanishingly small as the denominator remains roughly constant. Bossuet's literary sermons in particular, and liturgical language in general illustrate what happens when the numerator increases without bound as the denominator becomes vanishingly small. One might in general conceive of