Rosalind Coward and John Ellis: ‘S/Z’

Abstract

S/Z aims to demonstrate how language produces the realist text as natural. It examines not the structure of the text but its structuration. The text is seen as a productivity of meaning which is carried on within a certain regime of sense: realism. The productivity of language which is dramatically revealed in the unconscious and in avant-garde texts is given a fixity, a positionality, so that it functions to ‘denote’ a ‘reality’. Thus realism is more than a ‘natural attitude’, it is a practice of signification which relies upon the limits that society gives itself: certain realist texts, like the novella analysed in S/Z are consequently capable of dramatising these limits at certain moments. …