This is a difficult book, and to minimize the difficulties, we must try to give as many definitions as possible. Discourse is a language unit, analysable with the same methods as the sentence, but larger than the sentence.
For example, a question is a sentence, the answer to that question is a sentence, but the question and the answer taken together within the same context are a discourse. The great problem is that linguists cannot usually handle discourse. They can only handle sentences. And t [ ... ]
All novelists—except one—write stories. Almost everybody agrees that, in the absence of incidents that happen to a hero, and whose order creates suspense, we can hardly talk about novels. The one exception to this rule was, of course, James Joyce. He short-circuited both story and language. He used, instead, a complex mysterious tool, which wrote directly in our minds, our bodies, and our hearts. All his characters were actually one, in the end: they were all Joyce himself. His incid [ ... ]
