Rosalind Coward and John Ellis

"S/Z"

K. M. Newton

pp. 176-181

in: K. M. Newton (ed), Twentieth-century literary theory, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1997

Abstract

S/Z aims to demonstrate how language produces the realist text as natural. It examines not the structure of the text but its structuration. The text is seen as a productivity of meaning which is carried on within a certain regime of sense: realism. The productivity of language which is dramatically revealed in the unconscious and in avant-garde texts is given a fixity, a positionality, so that it functions to "denote" a "reality". Thus realism is more than a "natural attitude", it is a practice of signification which relies upon the limits that society gives itself: certain realist texts, like the novella analysed in S/Z are consequently capable of dramatising these limits at certain moments. …