ABSTRACT
Roger Fowler is in effect proposing-both here and in the collection of essays he edited which was reviewed by Mrs Vendler-an academic alliance between post-Saussure linguistics and post-I. A. Richards criticism. And why on earth shouldn't he? A priori, as it were, it sounds a good idea. After all, even if a literary masterpiece is more than the sum of its words, still when the words are taken away what is left? Blank pages! To invite the reader to look hard, really hard, at the words on the page is indeed what the modern critical doctrine of close reading amounts to, when it is reduced to its simplest terms. And, since a similar concentration is the initial premise of modern descriptive linguistics, some degree of amicable co-operation between the two approaches should not be impossible.
