At the heart of this important new book is the tension between literacy and the open acknowledgement of discrepancies within social and linguistic fields on the one hand, and what Sussman terms the resolving function, the utopian picture of harmony depicted by the state and large organizations, on the other. Combining literary theory with close textual readings of works by Hawthorne, Melville, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and Italo Calvino, this book is the first to explore the socio-political correlatives to literary studies - the mass media's ambivalence towards the linguistic apprehensions and skills that make them possible.