ABSTRACT
Austin's move from locutionary identity to illocutionary force established a distinction with capital consequences for speech-act criticism of literature. One development of formalist validation of the text as locution has been what Mary Louise Pratt called the Poetic Language Fallacy, the conviction that the text is a self-contained linguistic artifact complete unto itself. However, structuralist analysis of poetic language has in recent years been broadly supplanted by the post-structuralist interpretive schemas developed from Jacques Derrida's version of deconstruction, schemas fully as concerned as speech-act criticism with textual performance and linguistic action. However, Derrida attributes language's transformations to its triumphant transcendence of context whereas Austin attributes them to its inevitable articulation with context. The result is that speech-act theory and deconstruction have as many points of conflict as points of contact; both are vital to positioning speech-act criticism within contemporary literary theory.
