This work asks: what is it that makes language powerful? The author uses the psychoanalytic concepts of narcissism and libidinal investment to explain how rhetoric compels us and how it can effect change. The works of Joseph Conrad, James Baldwin, Michael Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Arthur Miller, D.H. Lawrence, Ben Jonson, George Orwell and others are the basis of this exploration of the relationship between language and subject. Bringing together ideas from Freudian, post-Freudian, Lacanian and post-structuralist schools, Alcorn investigates the power of the text that underlies the reader-response approach to literature. He argues that the production of literary texts begins and ends with narcissistic self-love, and also that the reader's interest in these texts is directed by libidinal investment.