It is argued that contemporary discussions of literary representation - organized around the category of experience and its structuralist critique - are misleading. First, it is shown that although literary experience does not provide a foundation for representation, such experience is, nonetherless, not merely a chimera projected from an unacknowledged ‘grammar’. Second,it is shown that literary representations have conditions of possibility which are not reducible to language as it is conceived in structuralist theory.In conclusion, it is argued that if literary representation has no single foundation in experience or in language, then general theories of representation must give way to a more piecemeal ‘rhetoric’of literary capacities.