`I read Not Saussure with enormous admiration and enjoyment' - Michael Tanner For over quarter of a century, literary theory has been dominated by structuralist and post-structuralist writers claiming to be drawing out the implications of the ideas of Ferdinand de Saussure. Although 'post-Saussurean' theory has provoked a good deal of hostility, little adverse criticism has been directed at its philosophical underpinnings. This clearly and wittily written book, at once scrupulously fair and sharply critical, subjects the fundamental ideas of Derrida, Lacan, Barthes and their followers to a careful examination and demonstrates the baselessness of post-Saussurean claims about the relations between language, reality and self.