Just finished "On Difficulty", a collection of essays by George Steiner. I really liked "Whorf, Chomsky, and the Student of Literature". From page 155: Let me argue the point in a heightened, over-simplified way: there is not a significant literary text --- it may be quite short --- which does not generate its own 'language-sphere', whose bare existence will not, if we choose to experience it fully, somewhat alter the field of recognitions, the associative fabric, of the rest of language. [...] A coherent style is a counter-statement to the collective, unexaminedly normative conventions of vision operative or, more precisely, residual and largely inert in the surrounding vulgate.