Based upon Austin's foundational concept of the performative, speech acts in which to say is to do, the concept “literary performative” describes statements in second person fiction which are actualized when read by any reader. The concept of the “literary performative” is tested with textual moments in three postmodernist works: John Barth's short prose piece “Life‐Story” Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City; and Halo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler. Naming, chronological discrepancies, and the encoding of gender are all shown to interfere with the execution of literary performatives. Yet botched performances effect the duplicitous stance of recognizing oneself as playing with the boundaries between “reality” and “literature”: the postmodernist project.
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