At the heart of this important new book is the tension between literacy and the open acknowledgement of discrepancies within social and linguistic fields on the one hand, and what Sussman terms the resolving function, the utopian picture of harmony depicted by the state and large organizations, on the other. After discussing some examples of the resolving function--Barthes's notion of the myth, Kundera's fictional treatment of kitsch, and contemporary television--Sussman draws on a line of theoretical inquiry extending from Saussure to Derrida in order to put forth a differential model of...