Jonathan Culler

Bio: Jonathan Culler is an academic researcher from Cornell University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Criticism & Literary theory. The author has an hindex of 36, co-authored 130 publications receiving 10017 citations.

Literary History, Allegory, and Semiology

Abstract: 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 are not conditioned by those of 1921, in the sense that political, social, or economic events are sequentially conditioned. A purely literary history which took works in their chronological sequence would be irrelevant if not impossible because its temporality would correspond to no principle of development or causality. But if one deviates from chronology, from a purely sequential version of literary history, one must discover some other principle on which to base a historical series.

Deconstruction: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies

Abstract: Volume I Jonathan Culler Introduction Part 1. What is Deconstruction? 1. Jacques Derrida Letter to a Japanese Friend, in David Wood and Robert Bernasconi eds. Derrida and Differance [Northwestern University Press, 1988] First published in 1985 by Parousia Press 2. Kevin Newmark Deconstruction: see elsewhere la differance, for example, in L. Kritzman, ed. Columbia History of Twentieth-Century Thought [Columbia University Press, 2003] 3. Geoffrey Bennington Jacques Derrida, in S. Critchley and W. Schroeder, eds. A Companion to Continental Philosophy pp. 549-558 [Blackwell, 1998] 4. Jonathan Culler Deconstruction: Writing and Logocentrism, in Jonathan Culler On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism pp.85-110 [Cornell University Press, 1982] Most of this paper originally appeared in J. Sturrock, ed. Structuralism and Since: From Levi Strauss to Derrida pp.154-180 [Oxford University Press, 1979] 5. Jacques Derrida Linguistics and Grammatology Of Grammatology, Corrected Edition pp. 27-73 [Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998] 6. Jacques Derrida Semiology and Grammatology, interview with Julia Kristeva, in Positions pp.17-36 [University of Chicago Press / Continuum Books, 1981] Part 2. Philosophy 7. Jacques Derrida Differance Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs pp.129-160 [Northwestern University Press, 1973] 8. Jacques Derrida from 'Plato's Pharmacy', in V. Leitch, general ed., The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism pp.1830-1876 [W.W. North & Co., 2001] Originally published as 'Plato's Pharmacy' in Dissemination pp.63-155 [University of Chicago Press / Continuum Books, 1981] 9. Jacques Derrida Signature, Event, Context, in Samuel Marin and Henry Sussman, Glyph pp. 172-197 [Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977] 10. Gordon Bearn Derrida Dry: Iterating Iterability Analytically Diacritics 25:3, pp3-25 [Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995] 11. Rodolphe Gasche Infrastructure and Systematicity, in J.Sallis, ed. Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques Derrida pp.3-20 [Chicago University Press, 1987] Originally published as 'The General System', in The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection by Rodolphe Gasche, pp.239-281 [Harvard University Press, 1986] 12. Geoffrey Bennington Deconstruction and the Philosophers (The Very Idea) Oxford Literary Review 10, pp. 73-130 [1988] Reprinted in Geoffrey Bennington Legislations: The Politics of Deconstruction pp.11-60 [Verso, 1994] 13. Luton University Press for permission to reprint Geoffrey Bennington Genuine Gasche (perhaps), from Iprimatur 1/2-3, pp.252-257 [1996] 14. Outi Pasanen Gasche

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

Can the Subaltern Speak

Abstract: Some of the most radical criticism coming out of the West today is the result of an interested desire to conserve the subject of the West, or the West as Subject. The theory of pluralized ‘subject-effects’ gives an illusion of undermining subjective sovereignty while often providing a cover for this subject of knowledge. Although the history of Europe as Subject is narrativized by the law, political economy, and ideology of the West, this concealed Subject pretends it has ‘no geo-political determinations.’ The much publicized critique of the sovereign subject thus actually inaugurates a Subject. . . . This S/subject, curiously sewn together into a transparency by denega­ tions, belongs to the exploiters’ side of the international division of labor. It is impossible for contemporary French intellectuals to imagine the kind of Power and Desire that would inhabit the unnamed subject of the Other of Europe. It is not only that everything they read, critical or uncritical, is caught within the debate of the production of that Other, supporting or critiquing the constitution of the Subject as Europe. It is also that, in the constitution of that Other of Europe, great care was taken to obliterate the textual ingredients with which such a subject could cathect, could occupy (invest?) its itinerary not only by ideological and scientific production, but also by the institution of the law. ... In the face of the possibility that the intellectual is complicit in the persistent constitution of Other as the Self’s shadow, a possibility of political practice for the intel­ lectual would be to put the economic ‘under erasure,’ to see the economic factor as irreducible as it reinscribes the social text, even as it is erased, however imperfectly, when it claims to be the final determinant or the tran­ scendental signified. The clearest available example of such epistemic violence is the remotely orchestrated, far-flung, and heterogeneous project to constitute the colonial

Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on language and social life

Abstract: Scholars have vacillated for centuries between two opposing assessments of the role of poetics in social life. A long tradition of thinking about language and society argues that verbal art provides a central dynamic force in shaping linguistic structure and linguistic study. This position emerges clearly in the writings of Vico, Herder, and von Humboldt; attention from Sapir, the Russian "Formalists," and members of the Prague School to the role of poetics contributed to the development of performance studies and ethnopoe­ tics in the last two decades. Nonetheless, poetics has often been marginalized by anthropologists and linguists who believe that aesthetic uses of language are merely parasitic upon such "core" areas of linguistics as phonology, syntax, and semantics, or upon such anthropological fields as economy and social organization. The balance between these two views shifted in favor of poetics in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a new emphasis on performance directed attention away from study of the formal patterning and symbolic content of texts to the emergence of verbal art in the social interaction between performers and

The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality

Abstract: To raise the question of the nature of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself. So natural is the impulse to narrate, so inevitable is the form of narrative for any report of the way things really happened, that narrativity could appear problematical only in a culture in which it was absent-absent or, as in some domains of contemporary Western intellectual and artistic culture, programmatically refused. As a panglobal fact of culture, narrative and narration are less problems than simply data. As the late (and already profoundly missed) Roland Barthes remarked, narrative "is simply there like life itself. . international, transhistorical, transcultural."' Far from being a problem, then, narrative might well be considered a solution to a problem of general human concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into telling,2 the problem of fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to structures of meaning that are generally human rather than culture-specific. We may not be able fully to comprehend specific thought patterns of another culture, but we have relatively less difficulty understanding a story coming from another culture, however exotic that

Narrative Medicine: A Model for Empathy, Reflection, Profession, and Trust

Abstract: The effective practice of medicine requires narrative competence, that is, the ability to acknowledge, absorb, interpret, and act on the stories and plights of others. Medicine practiced with narrative competence, called narrative medicine, is proposed as a model for humane and effective medical practice. Adopting methods such as close reading of literature and reflective writing allows narrative medicine to examine and illuminate 4 of medicine's central narrative situations: physician and patient, physician and self, physician and colleagues, and physicians and society. With narrative competence, physicians can reach and join their patients in illness, recognize their own personal journeys through medicine, acknowledge kinship with and duties toward other health care professionals, and inaugurate consequential discourse with the public about health care. By bridging the divides that separate physicians from patients, themselves, colleagues, and society, narrative medicine offers fresh opportunities for respectful, empathic, and nourishing medical care.