The Yale Journal of Criticism

Implicitly refuting Sartre's famous What is Literature?, as well as all versions of literary analyses that look to discover the uniquely original and extra-contextual elements of the literary text (and the genius of their authors), Angenot offers a fresh new assessment of the role literature plays in a given social discourse compendium. Along the way, he portrays the literary text as that which speaks after all other discourses have had their say, not to offer a more profound or original perspective, but to simply re-cast what is already "thinkable" and "sayable" within the prevailing social discourse. If literature does fulfill a particular role, says Angenot, it is by conveying to the reader a carnivalesque sense that when it comes to knowledge claims made in other domains, "it ain't necessarily so."