Written in the 1980's, heyday of Deconstruction in university English Departments, Carolyn Norman Slaughter's study probes the ways that language "works" in the literature of a few American modernist authors. Slaughter's purpose is not to prove the futility and "meaning"lessness of language, as Deconstruction was striving to do at the time, but instead to recover the first-order importance and power of language, its radical effects, as set out in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger where language works to disclose, reveal, unfold (Erschliessen). However, German philosopher Martin Heidegger...