Blackwell Reference Online

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The concepts of performative language and speech acts provide insight into the interaction that occurs among speakers, hearers, language and the world. Speech-act theory often works together with other critical approaches, from deconstruction to cultural studies to psychoanalytic theory, contributing to these approaches a focus on the ‘performative’-that is to say, the active, dynamic or efficient-aspect of language. The speech-act critic is concerned with such questions as: how do spoken or written utterances affect the circumstances in which they take place? What gives these utterances and their speakers the authority necessary to alter reality? In what senses and under what circumstances can it be said that words change the world? These issues are addressed by Romantic writers themselves as well as by modern philosophers of language, and a speech-act approach to Romantic literature considers, among other things, the similarities and the differences in the way the issues are framed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.The terms ‘performative language’ and ‘speech-act theory’ derive from a movement in the philosophy of language begun in the 1950s by the Oxford philosopher J. L. Austin and continued by his American student John R. Searle. In a series of lectures published after his death as How to Do Things with Words, Austin challenged the prevailing philosophical view of ... log in or subscribe to read full text