ABSTRACT
The word “invention” is likely to conjure up images of steam engines or electric light bulbs, though it has a common musical use as well, as in Bach’s Two-Part Inventions. It is rarely used with reference to purely verbal objects, even if “inventive” and “inventiveness” are part of the standard vocabulary of literary criticism. I trust, however, that it will be clear from the previous chapter why I am extending its use to the verbal field. Inventions employing words take many forms, not just that of the literary work. We can point to philosophical arguments, historical descriptions, or reports of scientific experiments that, when they appear, cannot be accounted for or understood in terms of existing norms, and in being received and accommodated bring about permanent changes in those norms. (We noted above that no sharp distinction exists between originality and inventiveness in these fields.) My focus in this chapter will first be on verbal but not necessarily literary inventions, and then on what it is that makes possible the literary invention. I shall not attempt to broaden the argument to non-verbal invention and the nonverbal arts, other than by way of the occasional hint of what might be entailed in an extrapolation of the argument to this wider realm.
