ABSTRACT
In The Prison-Home of Language, Fredric Jameson argues that once a formalist or structuralist move is taken in literary studies, there is no way out of it.1 It is a step that commits the theorist to a long-term sentence within the maze of language, destined to wander endlessly through its passages without ever breaking out beyond them to establish connection with-well, in Jameson’s case, History. Criticism, in the sense bequeathed by the tradition running from Arnold to Leavis, has had a similar capacity for incarceration. Even those critics who do try to escape are eventually hauled back to the penitentiary or, equally likely, succumb to critical recidivism and troop back of their own accord.
