California Linguistic Notes Volume XXXIII, No. 2 Spring, 2008 Yomi Olusegun-Joseph Lagos State University, Nigeria A Play Of Signifieds: Realism, Literature, and the Politics of Meaning Abstract. While it goes without saying that creative literature inscribes human experience through the manipulations of verbal and rhetorical resources, it also stands to reason that literary deployments are epistemic and discursive, thus necessarily biased. To locate realism as a signifier of an irrefutable truth, as suggested by certain schools of thought, becomes highly problematic in literature since it is a linguistic system whose possibilities of meaning are ‘always in a process’ and therefore ‘never concluded’. This paper examines the claims of realism in literature, exploring its history and metamorphosis in time and space, and advancing that its foregrounding by a number of ideo-aesthetic interests as constituting the core of their discourses is, at best, an exercise in ‘idealism.’ This argument subtly branches into a recognition of how postcolonial literatures have inscribed their difference from the Western Master Text within the realistic discourse. It proffers a poststructuralist resolution of identifying a multiplicity of identities in any project exploring the realistic in imaginative literature. Key words: Realism, Literature, Poststructuralism, Relativity, Postcolonial Literatures.