Literalism and its limits

‘Literalism,’ which seeks to use descriptive language in a technically regimented and exacting manner without figuration, is shown as an incoherent linguistic ideal in architectural history writing. By attending to its four primary presumptions, which prop up a larger issue, literalism is exposed as not only flawed but troublesome in a global discipline. In contrast, the essay advocates for non-literal language as a living, disclosive, sometimes epiphanic vocabulary, over and against literalism’s dead and instrumental one. The former, it is argued, can manifest potent but hard to grasp matters operating in the tension between the symbolic and communicative dimensions of architecture. Thus, non-literal language is able to deepen not obscures historical understanding via architectural descriptions.