ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on two comments will relate what the author has said here to what has already been written on the subject. First, the systematic study of speech acts undertaken recently by philosophers and linguists, preeminently J. L. Austin and John Searle, should prove useful in clarifying the interpretation of literary texts. Successful analysis of language only codifies conventions that are already part of our knowledge of how to use and understand language. Second, applications of speech-act theory to literary criticism have so far concentrated on either metacritical or stylistic concerns. The metacritical applications usually involve efforts to distinguish the concept of literature from that of ordinary discourse. Some literary texts are evidently utterances of the author in propria persona; others are utterances not of the author but of a dramatic persona: in understanding both kinds of literary discourse the reader needs to register correctly what it is that the speaker is doing in uttering the words he speaks.
