The Philosophy of Literary Form

From the Foreword
These pieces are selections from work done in the Thirties, a decade so changeable that I at first thought of assembling them under the title, "While Everything Flows."

Their primary interest is in speculation on the nature of linguistic, or symbolic, or literary action—and in a search for more precise ways of locating or defining such action.

Words are aspects of a much wider communicative context, most of which is not verbal at all. Yet words also have a nature peculiarl...