How did the concept of language come to dominate modern intellectual history? In Language Alone Geoffrey Halt Harpham provides a comprehensive survey and critique of the pervasive role of language in modern thought. He shows how thinkers in such diverse fields as philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology and literary theory have made progress by referring their most difficult theoretical problems to what they presumed were the facts of language.

Why are some critical texts more compelling, memorable, or engaging than others? Can criticism be judged as a discourse of description, explanation, and analysis alone, or do our evaluations reflect other kinds of investments in it? In this book, Geoffrey Galt Harpham argues that the most powerful and effective criticism demands to be read as an expression of a distinctive sensibility, a way of being in the world; it demands, in other words, to be read as a discourse of character.
Through a series of detailed and intimate intellectual portraits of leading critics--Elaine Scarry, Martha...