The prose of the world, provisional title of a work that was to be unfinished, stems from the interest of Maurice Merleau-Ponty by the literary language, within a broader inquiry that starts from the discovery of the body as an active body or symbolic capacity, question of the origin of truth.
By studying the unusual modulation of the word in literary forms, "it is easier to show that language is by no means the simple garb of a thought that has clearly beforehand." Communication in literature, says Merleau-Ponty, is not the appeal of the writer significances made, that would be part of an a priori of the human spirit. The same writer is like a language that is built inventing their means of expression. Faced with the prosaic, which uses the signs established in culture, "the great prose is the art of capturing a sense I never had hitherto been objectified" and the writer moved dangerously.
Influenced by Psychology Art André Malraux and, especially, by the text of Jean-Paul Sartre "What is literature?" Merleau-Ponty delivery in these trials reflections on language in general, but also deals with a theory of expression that leads to issues such as dialogue and relationship with the other anthropological problems of communication or expression in art and in its first manifestations in the child.