Literary Knowledge: Noam Chomsky and Marc Angenot Robert Barsky The status of literary knowledge has been examined from perspectives which often reflect less about literature than about the motivations of the examining party. Literature as object domain recognizable because of its peculiar literariness, for example, is quite differently construed than literature as competing discursive practice in a realm of social discourse relations; and theoreticians looking for immanent qualities in the language of literary texts can become to varying degrees themselves indicative symptoms of a systematic malaise for theoreticians who look to the role of literature in society as a key to understanding the power of a prevailing ruling class. At the present juncture, there is a group of thinkers who, inspired by sociological / philosophical-minded theoreticians such as Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Mikhail Bakhtin, are questioning the functioning of literature within a broader set of practices deemed "social discourse." Theoreticians such as Marc Angenot, Régine Robin, Claude Duchet and others, are asking what literature knows that other kinds of texts do not, or cannot know, and what literature accomplishes in the marketplace of competing discursive practices. By focussing upon the founding father of social discourse theory (and practice), Marc Angenot, I will outline some of the claims that have been put forth in this field of research. But so as to go beyond simple restatement of accepted ideas, and to coincide two realms that have (in my opinion) far too little contact, I will integrate thoughts on similar issues from a domain that, at first glance, seems dramatically far afield; the political and linguistic writings of Noam Chomsky. My motivation here is multi-directional; both Angenot and Chomsky, despite their many differences, attempt to circumscribe literary knowledge within much larger social projects which centre around thinking about the role of language in prevailing socio-political structures, and both of them suggest a role for literature that is in some ways indicative of respective political projects which, though different in motivation and in method of procedure, share a common end for the amelioration through subversion of this prevailing political paradigm. The surprising results of this juxtaposition indicates the promise, as well as the flaws, of contemporary social (discourse) theory at a juncture in history that seems conspicuously gloomy and pathetically without hope of rebellion or radical change. One small point; it is difficult, or even unfair, to compare a whole school of thinking about texts from a socialized approach with the small number of comments that Chomsky has made on the subject, and in fact this is not my objective. What I am suggesting is that Chomsky's remarks concerning literature and literary criticism do represent a point of view which, even when described with respect to a relatively small number of remarks, nonetheless stand as a useful criticism of and complement to the sociocritical project. For the purposes of this study I'll be crossing a number of lightly-shaded boundaries; Marc Angenot is a founder-of-sorts of social discourse theory, a long-time participant in sociocriticism/sociocritique, and, by extension, claimant to a particular brand of discourse analysis theory. I will be discussing Angenot's contributions to both social discourse and sociocriticism, with particular emphasis upon the latter since as a school of thought it implicitly privileges literary knowledge as active force in the compendium of social discourses. The sociocritical approach is largely unknown to the English-speaking world except by reference to Edmond Cros' journal Sociocriticism (out of the University of Pittsburgh) and his book called Theory and Practice of Sociocriticism.(2) Despite the value of Cros'