ABSTRACT
Narrative becomes literary when it involves the performance of narrativity, metaphor when it involves the performance of metaphoricity, mimesis when it involves the performance of mimetivity, description when it involves the performance of descriptivity, and so on. There is an important distinction to be made between the two modes of literary performance, however. There is another aspect of the performance of literature that needs to be taken into account, one that is sometimes given short shrift in current theoretical discussions of signification and interpretation. It is something of a truism that a literary work is a temporal event rather than a static object, but one that can point to two distinct properties of the work: as having its origin in a series of creative acts whose final product, though produced in time, gives an illusory appearance of stasis; or as emerging only in the act of a reading.
