SOURCE: “The Problem of Reading,” in Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 55, No. 3, Summer, 1979, pp. 568–72.

In the following excerpt, King offers a positive evaluation of Tropics of Discourse.

It is increasingly apparent that our dominant model of theoretical self-understanding derives from linguistics and rhetoric. As in Saul Steinberg's whimsical sketches, we spin out a complexly dense fabric of sounds, letters, sentences, and paragraphs which constitute the possibility of individual and collective life. We discover ourselves in a text-world, “spoken” by a Discourse over which we have only illusory control. In the beginning was the Word, not man who is its concrete embodiment. We must decipher our world and ourselves as part of that world.

This cultural paradigm has been a while in the making. As Hayden White points out in Tropics of Discourse, Vico was perhaps the first modern thinker to understand the man-made world, i.e., culture, through a...