ABSTRACT
What strikes the outsider such as the present writer with a background in literary studies, literary theory and sociological systems theory as slightly odd, however, is the persistence of the catchphrase ‘the linguistic turn’ in the context of this particular debate. To be sure, the ‘turn’ taken by philosophy and other disciplines at the beginning of the twentieth century – identified retrospectively as ‘the linguistic turn’ by the philosopher Richard Rorty only in 1967 – is of fundamental importance.5 But then there has been so much going on since then that the – from the historian’s point of view – apparently widely accepted equation linguistic turn = literary theory = postmodernism surely merits closer scrutiny.6 This seems particularly necessary in view of the fact that in the fields of literary and cultural studies there has been a proliferation of subsequent ‘turns’ of all kinds since the 1980s, and this development makes the epithet ‘linguistic’ surely look old-fashioned and not ‘postmodern’ at all.7
