June 2019
0199672792
Sooner or later, our words take on meanings other than we intended. How Words Make Things Happensuggests that the conventional idea of persuasive rhetoric (which assumes a speaker’s control of calculated effects) and the modern idea of literary autonomy (which assumes that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’) together have produced a misleading account of the relations between words and human action. Words do make things happen. But they cannot be counted on to produce the result they intend.