Literary Speech as a Medium of Contact

An intersubjective event, a text comprises the medium of contact between subjects of literary discourse. Within texts the conventionality of speech serves to enable us to express ourselves, while at the same time it-owing to conventionality itself-makes shared individual expe rience at least difficult, if not impossible, a condition of which modern literary culture is painfully aware. Epitomizing this paradox of the uniquely personal and the formulaic/ impersonal is the literary discourse of love. In post-Romantic literary culture this paradox reveals itself in the shift of authors’ and readers’ attention from accepted rhetorical forms to those “transitive parts” of thought and speech that (according to William James) pass largely unrecognized in everyday language practice. Precisely these “transitive parts” activate the fleeting “feelings of relation” (as opposed to conventional meanings) that connote extended and multiple relationships “between the larger objects of our thought.” We argue that this authorreader pact-evinced, variously, by Flaubert’s search for “absolute style” and Barthes’ exploration of the aesthetic potential of lovers’ discourse-heightens attention to the materiality of language and to the mimetic, collaborative, performative aspects of literary communication. “The zealous practice of a perfect reception” invokes enhanced pleasure and the empathic effect that (post)modern readers learn to derive from language play by locating the subtle subjectivity of expression in the seemingly style-less banality of everyday speech. In this article this textual strategy of literary modernism is analyzed by way of selfreflexive love speech in the prose of Gustav Flaubert and the poetry of William Carlos Williams.