If I want to talk about politics what does that have to do with literature? How can I make the leap from the literary to “real” world? Who cares, or why should one care, about literature anyway?

I hate these questions and yet they are the heart of the matter. It is one thing to say, á la Barthes, that the same cultural codes that organize our understanding of the world shape literary texts.  This is a more persuasive answer than various theories of mimesis, even if mimesis may claim longevity in a way that nonrepresentation theories of language can.

Language, breaking language, recreating meaning: these are the aspects of the literary that have the strongest political potential. Is this to say that the literary embodies language differently than other forms of linguistic expression? What is special about literature? Literature has the ability to reveal the non-representational quality of language in a way that a legal decision (for example) does not. But what is the political potential of literature? It is not enough to point to the novels, poems, or literary experiments that have put pressure on the fault lines of language-as-carrier-of-meaning?