Showing papers by "Jonathan Culler published in 1981"

The Pursuit Of Signs - Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction

Abstract: To gain a deeper understanding of the literary movement that has dominated recent Anglo-American literary criticism, The Pursuit of Signs is a must. In a world increasingly mediated, it offers insights into our ways of consuming texts that are both brilliant and bold. Dancing through semiotics, reader-response criticism, the value of the apostrophe and much more, Jonathan Culler opens up for every reader the closed world of literary criticism. Its impact on first publication, in 1981, was immense; now, as Mieke Bal notes, 'the book has the same urgency and acuity that it had then', though today it has even wider implications: 'with the interdisciplinary turn taking hold, literary theory itself, through this book, becomes a much more widespread tool for cultural analysis'.

The Pursuit of Signs

Abstract: To gain a deeper understanding of the literary movement that has dominated recent Anglo-American literary criticism, The Pursuit of Signs is a must. In a world increasingly mediated, it offers insights into our ways of consuming texts that are both brilliant and bold. Dancing through semiotics, reader-response criticism, the value of the apostrophe and much more, Jonathan Culler opens up for every reader the closed world of literary criticism. Its impact on first publication, in 1981, was immense; now, as Mieke Bal notes, 'the book has the same urgency and acuity that it had then', though today it has even wider implications: 'with the interdisciplinary turn taking hold, literary theory itself, through this book, becomes a much more widespread tool for cultural analysis'.

Semiotics of tourism

Abstract: 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.

Convention and Meaning: Derrida and Austin*

Abstract: 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 manifested in an utterance, then one must contend with the fact that, as we say, a speaker can mean different things by the same linguistic sequence on different occasions. "Could you move that box?" may be a request, or a question about one's interlocutor's strength, or even, as rhetorical question, the resigned indication of an impossibility. Such examples seem to reinstate a model in which the subject-the consciousness of the speaker-is made the source of meaning: despite the contribution of linguistic structure, the meaning of the utterance varies from case to case; its meaning is what the speaker means by it. Confronted with such a model, the partisan of structural explanation will ask what makes it possible for the speaker to mean these several things by the one utterance. Just as we account for the meaning of sentences by analyzing the linguistic system, so we should account for the meaning of utterances (or as Austin calls it, their illocutionary

The Uses of Madame Bovary

Abstract: 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,