Showing papers by "Jonathan Culler published in 1979"

Semiotics and Deconstruction

Abstract: 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, of course, the attack on semiotics comes from a traditional humanism, affronted that a discipline with scientific pretensions should claim to treat products of the human spirit. These arguments can be countered in various ways which I shan't be discussing here. I'm interested in a more radical critique which also focuses on the scientific pretension of semiotics a critique which compels our attention precisely because it isn't another version of traditional humanism. One could cite various examples of this position. I offer as not untypical, but among the better informed, J. Hillis Miller's argument that among literary critics who have been influenced by European developments

Structuralism and Grammatology

Abstract: 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 discourse. I chose my title because I had intended to concentrate on two competing discourses, which can be called roughly the structuralist and deconstructionist, and to look at a point of intersection, a moment of competition: Derrida's reading of Saussure in De la grammatologie. Though I shall do this briefly in order to discuss the relationship between structuralism and deconstruction, I respond to my place on the program by casting my net a bit wider and addressing the larger topic which the organizers call "The Question of Formalism: From Aesthetic Distance to Difference." In the competition among modes of discourse to replace the New Criticism, what has happened to formalism? I think I can report that it is alive and well, doing very nicely.