ABSTRACT
If one were to identify the predominant, if not central, concern in twentieth-
century literary theory – a sort of basso continuo or ide´e fixe, depending on whether
one wants to be neutral or tendentious – one could point to a functionalist
concern or, again, in a more tendentious fashion, to a functionalist demon. To
prove that this is not a rash, take-it-or-leave-it assertion but a legitimate claim, a
cursory and panoramic look at the most influential theoretical trends of the past
century will suffice. Notwithstanding their different – to a large extent, indeed
conflicting – agendas and mots d’ordres, new criticism, French structuralism,
deconstruction and poststructuralism, can be said to share one common guiding
principle, namely that the prime office of theory is to explore, indeed to test, the
functional and, for the most radical among the deconstructionists, dysfunctional
plane of literary language. Focusing on how literary texts, whether they be
poems or prose fiction, work ‘inside’ rather than on how they work, so to speak,
‘inside out’ – in relation to reality or the world at large – these theoretical trends
have each in distinctive ways promoted an immanentist picture of literary lan-
guage, the corollary of which has been what Thomas Pavel has unsympatheti-
cally described as the ‘‘moratorium on referential issues.’’1
