Jonathan Culler - The Fortunes of the Performative

The notion of the performative - an utterance that accomplishes the act that it designates

This article follows the change of this notion to show:

1. why it appeared useful for literary theory and what happens when literature is laid out as fundamentally performative

2. how it functions in theory and criticism associated with deconstruction

3. what role it plays in recent work in gender studies and queer theory

Questions are posed how to think about the constitutive force of language, the nature of discursive events and literature as an act.