Saussure as traffic lights or, translating literary theory into the everyday.

Abstract

An account of how publishing practices shape literary theory textbooks. This chapter examines how the compositional and editorial practices of such textbooks are governed by marketing, and the conflicts thus produced. The chapter develops a form of close paratextual and rhetorical analysis to examine how textbooks ‘translate' complex concepts and arguments: through the use of familiar registers, analogies and figures. Such strategies do indeed familiarise and ‘domesticate' theory, but frequently transform the concepts themselves, often beyond recognition.