Jonathan Culler
Biographic Data
| ID | 256386 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jonathan Culler |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jonathan |
| FAMILY NAME | Culler |
| SIGNATURE | CULLER J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Cornell University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 81 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 145 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 80 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1973 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Contemporary Entangled Elegy
Analyzing Narrative: Roland Barthes' Forgotten Interview
This commentary reflects upon an interview with Roland Barthes from 1965 in which he discusses the structural analysis of narrative. The presentation prefigures the publication of Barthes' well-known essay, ' Introduction à l'analyse structurale des récits', which appeared shortly after in Communications, No. 8, in 1966. A close reading of both interview and essay shows that the interview differs from the published essay, notably in following mor…
Critical Rhythm
Diff ering Fates of Some Modernist Poets' Investments of Belief in Sounds
Critical Rhythm: The Poetics of a Literary Life Form
Deconstruction
Theory of the Lyric
What sort of thing is a lyric poem? An intense expression of subjective experience? The fictive speech of a specifiable persona? Examining ancient and modern poems from Sappho to Ashbery, Jonathan Culler reveals the limitations of these two models—the Romantic and the modern—and challenges the assumption that poems exist to be interpreted.
Rhetoric and Lyric Address
Classicists have contrasted the ancient lyric’s direct address to an audience with the solipsistic, meditative character of modern lyrics, in which the poet addresses himself or no one. But in accounts of romantic and post-Romantic lyrics, the figure of apostrophe or address to an absent impossible addressee, cited as an indicator of solipsism, is frequently treated as a conventional element due to a classical heritage. This chapter explores the …
French Theory Revisited
“French Theory” may be an American construction but it was reasonable to group together heterogeneous thinkers whose work was related to structuralism and filled a void left by American analytical philosophy. Local conditions—the hermeneutical orientation of literary studies and the assumed opposition between literature and science—affected the reception of French thought and led to the reconceiving it as “post-structuralist.” Though influenced b…
Baudelaire's Destruction
Baudelaire's Destruction Jonathan Culler (bio) In an essay on the poet Théodore de Banville, Baudelaire gives a very striking account of modern verse. He declares that hyperbole and apostrophe are the forms of language not only most agreeable but also most necessary to lyric, and he goes on to maintain that l'art moderne a une tendance essentiellement démoniaque. Et il semble que cette part infernale de l'homme, que l'homme prend plaisir à s'expl…
Literature and cultural studies
‘Literature and cultural studies’ explores a complex relationship. In principle, there need not be conflict between literary and cultural studies. Literary studies is not committed to a conception of the literary object that cultural studies must repudiate. Cultural studies arose as the application of techniques of literary analysis to other cultural materials. It treats cultural artefacts as ‘texts’ to be read rather than as objects that are sim…
What is literature and does it matter?
The question ‘What is literature?’ arises because critics and theorists hope, by saying what literature is, to promote what they consider the most pertinent critical methods and to dismiss methods that neglect the most basic and distinctive aspects of literature. In the context of recent theory, the question ‘What is literature?’ matters because theory has highlighted the literariness of texts of all sorts. To reflect on literariness is to keep b…
Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction
Culler offers insights into theories about the nature of language and meaning, looks at whether literature is a form of self-expression or a method of appeal to an audience, and outlines the ideas behind deconstruction and semiotics.
Afterword: Theory Now and Again
The invitation to think about "theory now" requires a double response. Insofar as theory has a "now," it is a "now" in the time of disciplines and institutions, a point in an institutional trajectory. To ask where theory is now invites us to describe where theory has been and where it is heading. And certainly there is much that could be said about theory now: narratology, for some time in the doldrums, seems to be making a comeback, taking cogni…
Lyric, History, and Genre
Lyric, History, and Genre Jonathan Culler (bio) Ralph Cohen founded New Literary History in 1969, inaugurating the first of a series of journals of literary theory that exercised a powerful effect on criticism. Swiftly followed by diacritics (1970), SubStance (1971), boundary 2 (1973), Semiotexte (1974), and Critical Inquiry (1974), New Literary History is the only one to have been led for forty years by its founder, and I take this opportunity t…
Preparing the Novel: Spiralling Back
La Préparation du roman, Barthes's course at the Collège de France which was interrupted by his death in 1980, announces a change of life: not giving up analysing literature and culture to write a novel but `preparing the novel', working as if he were going to write a novel. Barthes's approach to the novel is quite singular. With no interest in narrative, nor in extracting the meaning from experience, he treats the novel as a sort of notation, an…
The Literary in Theory
Has theory neglected literature? Often literary and cultural theory, which goes by the nickname "Theory," has seemed to be the theory of everything except literature: theory of language, of sexuality, of history, of the body, of the psyche, of meaning (or meaninglessness), of politics, but not theory of literature. In this timely and wide-ranging book, Jonathan Culler, whose lucid analyses of structuralism, semiotics, and deconstruction have been…
Doing Cultural Studies
Whither Comparative Literature
results from the general condition of the humanities in the techno university or the university of excellence is scarcely clear. 1 But certainly departments or programmes of comparative literature have not reaped the benefits of their methodological success.On the one hand, the spread of what once distinguished the field leads to a lack of distinctiveness and thus a crisis of identity.On the other hand, programmes in comparative literature are st…
Philosophie et littérature: Les Fortunes Du Performatif
When Austin distinguished performative from constative utterances, he was trying to reintegrate in a philosophical reflection those aspects of language which are acts, and saw that language could always be seen as performative. His paradoxical literary offspring has reintegrated fiction to his analysis as precisely the proof of performativity because of linguistic utterances’ repeatability (Derrida), or by the constitution of social norms and ide…
L’Essentiel de l’Arbitraire: Saussures Glas
L’Essentiel de l’Arbitraire: Saussures Glas
Just Being Difficult?: Academic Writing in the Public Arena
Is academic writing, particularly in the disciplines of literary theory and cultural studies, needlessly obscure? The claim has been widely circulated in the media and subject to passionate debate, but it has not been the subject of serious discussion. Just Being Difficult? provides learned and thoughtful analyses of the claim, of those it targets, and of the entire question of how critical writing relates to its intended publics and to audiences…
Introduction: Dressing Up, Dressing Down
Grounds of Comparison: Around the Work of Benedict Anderson
Benedict Anderson, professor at Cornell and specialist in Southeast Asian studies, is best known for his book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1991). It is no understatement to say that this is one of the most influential books of the last twenty years. Widely read both by social scientists and humanists, it has become an unavoidable document. For people in the humanities, Anderson is particularly interes…
Barthes: A Very Short Introduction
Roland Barthes (1915-80) was an 'incomparable enlivener of the literary mind' whose lifelong fascination was with 'the way people make their world intelligible'. He has a multifaceted claim to fame: to some he is the structuralist who outlined a 'science of literature', and the most prominent promoter of semiology; to others he stands not for science but pleasure, espousing literature which gives the reader a creative role." "He called for 'the d…
Baudelaire sataniske vers
Baudelaire sataniske vers
Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction
Culler offers insights into theories about the nature of language and meaning, looks at whether literature is a form of self-expression or a method of appeal to an audience, and outlines the ideas behind deconstruction and semiotics.
Philosophy and Literature: The Fortunes of the Performative
The notion of the performative-an utterance that accomplishes the act that it designates-was proposed by the philosopher J. L. Austin to describe a type of utterance neglected by philosophers. This article follows the vicissitudes of the concept in literary and cultural theory to show (1)why it appeared useful for literary theory and what happens when literature is construed as fundamentally performative; (2) how it functions in theory and critic…
Grounds of Comparison
Diacritics - Volume 29, Number 4, Winter 1999
Anderson and the Novel
Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism has, in the past decade, become a classic of the humanities and social sciences. Any theoretically savvy discussion of nations or of societies of any sort must cite it for its fundamental insight that nations and, as Anderson points out, "all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined" [6]. …
Ferdinand de Saussure
The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction
Lyric, History, and Genre
Lyric, History, and Genre Jonathan Culler (bio) Ralph Cohen founded New Literary History in 1969, inaugurating the first of a series of journals of literary theory that exercised a powerful effect on criticism. Swiftly followed by diacritics (1970), SubStance (1971), boundary 2 (1973), Semiotexte (1974), and Critical Inquiry (1974), New Literary History is the only one to have been led for forty years by its founder, and I take this opportunity t…
Paul de Man's War' and the Aesthetic Ideology
Convention and Meaning: Derrida and Austin
IN THE Saussurian perspective, meaning is the product of linguistic conventions, the effect of a system of differences. To account for meaning is to set forth the relations of contrast and the possibilities of combination that constitute a language. However, as many have observed, a theory that derives meaning from linguistic conventions does not account for it completely. If one conceives of meaning as the effect of linguistic relations manifest…
Fabula and Sjuzhet in the Analysis of Narrative: Some American Discussions
When I first began writing really just began writing, I was tremendously impressed by anything by everything having a beginning a middle and an ending. I think one naturally is impressed by anything having a beginning a middle and an ending when one is beginning writing and that is a natural thing because when one is emerging from adolescence, which is really when one first begins writing one feels that one would not have been one emerging from a…
Philosophie et littérature: Les Fortunes Du Performatif
When Austin distinguished performative from constative utterances, he was trying to reintegrate in a philosophical reflection those aspects of language which are acts, and saw that language could always be seen as performative. His paradoxical literary offspring has reintegrated fiction to his analysis as precisely the proof of performativity because of linguistic utterances’ repeatability (Derrida), or by the constitution of social norms and ide…
Communicative Competence and Normative Force
Recorded in Ithaca, NY by Cornell University., Sponsored by: German Literature, Department of,Women's Studies Program., Lecture, March 16, 1985
Presupposition and Intertextuality
Analyzing Narrative: Roland Barthes' Forgotten Interview
This commentary reflects upon an interview with Roland Barthes from 1965 in which he discusses the structural analysis of narrative. The presentation prefigures the publication of Barthes' well-known essay, ' Introduction à l'analyse structurale des récits', which appeared shortly after in Communications, No. 8, in 1966. A close reading of both interview and essay shows that the interview differs from the published essay, notably in following mor…
Baudelaire's Destruction
Baudelaire's Destruction Jonathan Culler (bio) In an essay on the poet Théodore de Banville, Baudelaire gives a very striking account of modern verse. He declares that hyperbole and apostrophe are the forms of language not only most agreeable but also most necessary to lyric, and he goes on to maintain that l'art moderne a une tendance essentiellement démoniaque. Et il semble que cette part infernale de l'homme, que l'homme prend plaisir à s'expl…
Whither Comparative Literature
results from the general condition of the humanities in the techno university or the university of excellence is scarcely clear. 1 But certainly departments or programmes of comparative literature have not reaped the benefits of their methodological success.On the one hand, the spread of what once distinguished the field leads to a lack of distinctiveness and thus a crisis of identity.On the other hand, programmes in comparative literature are st…
On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism
Structuralism and Grammatology
In organizing this conference the editors of boundary 2 have asked us to consider the situation of contemporary American criticism, in which, as they say, various methods and rhetorics have been competing to replace the New Criticism. As one of the opening speakers, my job is to utter some debatable propositions so that they can be debated: I'm going to make tendentious remarks about the relationship between some of these competing modes of disco…
On Trope and Persuasion
HETORIC, claimed I. A. Richards in his Philosophy of Rhetoric, should be a study of misunderstanding and its remedies. We struggle all days with misunderstandings, and no apology is required for any study which can prevent or remove them. The contributors to this issue of New Literary History could doubtless claim that their essays prevent future misunderstandings of subjects they treat and remove misunderstandings perpetrated by previous discuss…
Literary History, Allegory, and Semiology
R EN E WELLEK, whom no one could accuse of indifference to history, opens the chapter on Literary History in The Theory of Literature with a question which even he finds difficult to answer: Is it possible to write literary history, that is, to write that which will be both literary and a history? Though he would very much like to give an affirmative reply, he is unhappily aware that literature is not sequential, that the literary works of 1922 a…
Structure of Ideology and Ideology of Structure
SHE AUTOTELIC or autoerotic character of much recent structuralism and semiology derives from its response to the problems of ideology. Aware, on the one hand, that their most important empirical function might be one of demystification (of deconstructing ideologies), structuralists have been drawn to a Marxist conception of ideology as false consciousness. An ideology is a theory which justifies particular economic, political, and intellectual p…
Structure of Ideology and Ideology of Structure
SHE AUTOTELIC or autoerotic character of much recent structuralism and semiology derives from its response to the problems of ideology. Aware, on the one hand, that their most important empirical function might be one of demystification (of deconstructing ideologies), structuralists have been drawn to a Marxist conception of ideology as false consciousness. An ideology is a theory which justifies particular economic, political, and intellectual p…
Commentary
Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature
Stanley Fish & the Righting of the Reader
Competent Readers
The Poetics of Coercion: An Interpretation of Literary Competence
Presupposition and Intertextuality
Literary History, Allegory, and Semiology
R EN E WELLEK, whom no one could accuse of indifference to history, opens the chapter on Literary History in The Theory of Literature with a question which even he finds difficult to answer: Is it possible to write literary history, that is, to write that which will be both literary and a history? Though he would very much like to give an affirmative reply, he is unhappily aware that literature is not sequential, that the literary works of 1922 a…
Apostrophe
Deciphering the Signs of the Times
Semiology is the science of signs, but this definition tells us very little. If anything which has meaning is a sign, then semiology might plausibly claim most of human knowledge as province. All human artifacts, be they texts, paintings, songs, buildings, or everyday utilitarian objects, have meaning, as do all those human actions which are usually studied by sociology, psychology, history, anthropology. In treating artifacts and actions as bear…
The Uses of Uncertainty Re-Viewed
Ferdinand de Saussure
On Trope and Persuasion
HETORIC, claimed I. A. Richards in his Philosophy of Rhetoric, should be a study of misunderstanding and its remedies. We struggle all days with misunderstandings, and no apology is required for any study which can prevent or remove them. The contributors to this issue of New Literary History could doubtless claim that their essays prevent future misunderstandings of subjects they treat and remove misunderstandings perpetrated by previous discuss…
Is There Life for Saussure after Structuralism
Structuralism and Grammatology
In organizing this conference the editors of boundary 2 have asked us to consider the situation of contemporary American criticism, in which, as they say, various methods and rhetorics have been competing to replace the New Criticism. As one of the opening speakers, my job is to utter some debatable propositions so that they can be debated: I'm going to make tendentious remarks about the relationship between some of these competing modes of disco…
Semiotics and Deconstruction
The moment when semiotics is becoming well-established in America a subject of conferences, a topic of university courses, and even a domain to which people in various traditional disciplines are beginning to relate their own work is also, as is perhaps only appropriate, a moment when semiotics finds itself under attack, criticized as a version of precisely the scientific positivism which is itself very prone to reject semiotics. In many cases, o…
Prolegomena To A Theory Of Reading
Reply to van der Hoven
At end of his review of Ferdinand de Saussure Mr. van der Hoven claims that theorists of language should address themselves to substantive questions of such as what processes do we choose some formulations and reject others as inadequate or false. Since linguists have never defined their task as that of describing how we choose what to say about a particular situation, Mr. van der Hoven seems to be proposing a grand new vision of linguistics, bas…
Fabula and Sjuzhet in the Analysis of Narrative: Some American Discussions
When I first began writing really just began writing, I was tremendously impressed by anything by everything having a beginning a middle and an ending. I think one naturally is impressed by anything having a beginning a middle and an ending when one is beginning writing and that is a natural thing because when one is emerging from adolescence, which is really when one first begins writing one feels that one would not have been one emerging from a…
Culler on Saussure
Semiotics of Tourism
Semiotique de l'acte touristique comme acte d'appropriation symbolique, a travers des exemples, de Stendhal a Barthes en passant par le Grand Canyon: phenomenologie de l'objet et du site touristique comme marque, reduction du different a l'identique par une ritualisation du voyage et des objets.
The Uses of Madame Bovary
It seems appropriate to begin a celebration of Flaubert with the work for which he has been most celebrated.' Percy Lubbock declared in The Craft of Fiction that Madame Bovary remains perpetually the novel of all novels which the criticism of fiction cannot overlook, and the reasons he cites would make it a particularly appropriate point of departure for a critical conference. There is no mistaking or mis-reading it, he continues
Convention and Meaning: Derrida and Austin
IN THE Saussurian perspective, meaning is the product of linguistic conventions, the effect of a system of differences. To account for meaning is to set forth the relations of contrast and the possibilities of combination that constitute a language. However, as many have observed, a theory that derives meaning from linguistic conventions does not account for it completely. If one conceives of meaning as the effect of linguistic relations manifest…
The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction
Interview: Fredric Jameson
Philosophy (54 works) · Art (47 works) · Literature (28 works) · Linguistics (27 works) · Sociology (25 works) · Epistemology (23 works) · History (18 works) · Psychology (17 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Political science (12 works)