ABSTRACT
The deployment of language is not governed by a general function in relation to which such a comparison might be made. Perhaps all that is meant by the formal use of language or its formal analysis is that these make no appeal to the experience of language users. Althusser himself invokes the structuralist account of the relation between subjectivity and language in order to reconstruct this Marxian category. In different ways both culturalist and structuralist approaches to literature assume that capacities and forms of agency have an essential general foundation in a subjects capacity to represent things. In this sense Lord and Ong exemplify a formal approach to language which, for want of a better word, we might call rhetorical. Literary realism defined as a particular type of representation or text, one that conceals its own status as language by producing an illusion or effect of experience.
