ABSTRACT
Literature is rife with examples of its power to change its characters' lives. Strangeness, as the other side of the comfortable and the familiar, is what post-structuralism offers by making strange, not the world, but language. Saussure defined the sign as the indissoluble union of a sound and a concept born of a simultaneous cut in the continuous ribbons of sound and thought. He structured language as a system of horizontal strings of signs, each sign of which is separated from the others by belonging to a vertical paradigm, a list of the signs substitutable for it. The acknowledgment of the promise of meaning heard in the music and materiality of the words moves readers to allow a work's scenes, situations, characters, events, actions to tap into memory and desire and lead them on to other word-drawn scenes and actions.
