One way to chart an intersection between philosophical and literary discourses is by tracing lines of self-directed inquiry, in either discipline, that arrive at language as a limit condition for not only the articulation but the determination of conceptual frameworks. When attention is directed to discourse itself, it becomes increasing apparent that, to a certain degree, language is both bearer and generator of meaning, so a fundamentally self-reflexive concern with exposition attaches itself to its examinations. There are any number of entry points into how and where problems of linguistic expression announce themselves. After all, the possibilities and limits of language describe the contours of both disciplines from their outsets. For the present purposes, it is useful to choose moments where the disciplines are prompted to diverge from their traditional content to address their linguistic forms. In philosophy, Immanuel Kant's grand project of Critical Philosophy in the latter part of the eighteenth century marks a moment when the investigation of limits to knowledge comes up against a tangle of concerns with self, logic and mind-world division that creates an opening for the consideration of language in reframing/resolving some of its difficulties. In the latter part of the twentieth century, and from a wholly different direction, a preoccupation with linguistic mechanics is introduced into literary criticism and disrupts ideas about meaning and interpretation. In between these moments, linguistics and philosophy of language develop unavoidable contentions about the structures, instabilities and parameters of language, and these have direct implications for the status of meaningful determination in either discipline. The idea here is not to posit or trace the historical influence of linguistics on philosophy and literature but rather to examine various iterations of discourse that arrive at limits in language, whether in paradox or exhaustion, so as to investigate an overall dilemma in the determination of meaningful discourse, without recourse to sceptical or nihilistic suppositions. In the twentieth century, an increased consideration of language as potential bearer, generator and condition of meaning leans toward a logical positivism, carrying over the classical emphasis on essential structures of discourse and thought, but then away from this, into more rhetorical considerations of how language does or does not relate to the world. This latter shift is paralleled by an overall philosophical deemphasis, post-Kant, on essentialized logic and metaphysical 'ideas' that might 'ground' discourse, and so, in step with the rhetorical shift is a rise of scepticism toward determinate meaning: if there is no essential referent behind representations of and discourses about the world, then perhaps there is only an untethered chain of relative interpretations. Scepticism becomes a seductive, negative position that rejects the idea of objective reality in favor of interpretive relativity. In literary discourse, scepticism is tied to a linguistic formalism in which language is stripped of an essential, logically structured capacity for reference outside of itself- language bends into and disrupts itself. The modern-contemporary period exhibits continued debates between essentialist and sceptical notions of knowledge, reality and language, and the shift away from essence/logic and toward rhetorical methods manifests in a conflicting array of approaches to language that illustrate an overall sense of indeterminacy in discourse. Given the host of confusions that attend this scenario, it is understandable that intractable debates and dilemmas concerning the status of meaning and the parameters of interpretive practice inflect both philosophical and literary disciplines. With an aim to examining how such considerations of language affect literary theory and criticism, problematically, mistakenly, insightfully or otherwise, the effort here is to untangle lines of inquiry that reach toward various limits of language and assess how these frame ongoing discourse. Since the perceived (im)possibility of resolution or determination in literary-linguistic debates is precisely what perpetuates misunderstandings and dilemmas about the terms, stakes and parameters of discourse, the present, pragmatic examination is an attempt to clarify rather than contend; it is an attempt to clear out misconstrued, sometimes willfully obstructive ideas about the functions and capacities of language to expose the 'ground' of discourse- starting with the problematic influence of the Kantian model of self and knowledge that prefigures a modern linguistic turn in critical discourse.