1,721,282 research outputs found
Literary Studies Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. An Interview with Jonathan Culler
Full text linkFrederick Luis Aldama interviews Jonathan Culler on the past, the present, and the future of literary studies in general and narratology in particular
A Conversation with Jonathan Culler
No full textDuring his 38 years on the Cornell faculty, Jonathan Culler (successor to M. H. Abrams as Class of 1916 Professor of English) has served as academic administrator as well as teacher and scholar, first as Director of the Society for the Humanities and subsequently as Chair of the English Department, Chair of the Comparative Literature Department, and Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. His undergraduate teaching has included Freshman Humanities seminars, as well as large lecture courses treating literary texts as more than self-reflective explorations of the act of creating novels and poems. Much of his teaching at all levels has involved his scholarly interest in critical theory, which he has pursued since his pre-Cornell days at Cambridge and Oxford, where he also engaged in a form of academic administration quite different from what he has found at Cornell and other American universities.1_g15jcd0
Narratologia vs Poetica. Appunti in margine a Theory of the Lyric di Jonathan Culler
Full text linkIl saggio affronta i rapporti fra teoria del testo poetico e narratologia. Il grande progresso negli studi di narratologia, in particolare le prospettive offerte dalle scienze cognitive e dalla più recente teoria della fictionality, hanno ridotto l’autonomia della poesia. Oggi, la lirica viene sempre più spesso concepita come la provincia di una più vasta regione dominata dal racconto. Nel 2015 Jonathan Culler ha tuttavia rimesso in discussione un simile orientamento, e ha argomentato che la poesia lirica, con la sua lunga tradizione, è perfettamente indipendente e si costituisce come un genere autonomo. La lirica avrebbe a che fare con l’epidissi, con il discorso epidittico, vale a dire con un tipo particolare di performance che restituisce valori attraverso qualcosa come un effetto di voce (e non attraverso la voce piena di un locutore).The article deals with the relationship between theory of the poetic text and narratology. The massive improvement of narratology, namely the perspectives opened up by cognitive storytelling and by the most recent theory of fictionality, have limited the autonomy of lyrics. Poetry nowadays tends to be conceived as a sheer region of a continuum where narration dominates. However, in 2015 Jonathan Culler has reacted against this trend, arguing that lyrics, with its long tradition, has a perfect independence as a genre. Lyrics would be connected with epideixis, with the epideictic discourse, that’s to say with a particular kind of performance which communicates values through a voicing (and not through the full voice of a speaker)
Jonathan Culler: Teoría, literatura y la posibilidad de la crítica
Full text linkThe present paper examines the way in which Jonathan Culler approaches the problem of the possibility of critique as well as the role of literature in fulfilling this possibility in the postmodern context of questioning of truth. Special attention will be paid to the trilogy composed by Literary Theory. A Very Short Introduction (1997), The Literary in Theory (2007), and Theory of the Lyric (2015). In these works, Culler proposes a return to the literary whilst keeping in touch with the contributions of theory. Culler argues for literature’s ability of staying away from the determinants of ideology. In so doing, Culler mobilizes the heritage of aesthetics—the notion of imagination as free play of the determinants of material circumstances and the idea of reconciliation of the particular and the universal—, as well as the legacy of the linguistic turn. The scope of the possibility of critique will be analyzed by comparing the general Derridean textuality subscribed by Culler with the idea of “idéalinguisterie”, a neologism coined by Alain Badiou to refer to the reduction of any reality into discourse. Finally, we will argue that the lack of a strong theory of truth prevents Culler from going beyond the possibility of escaping from ideology.Este ensayo examina el modo en que Jonathan Culler aborda el problema de la posibilidad de la crítica y del papel de la literatura en la realización de esta posibilidad en el contexto postmoderno de cuestionamiento de la verdad. Se prestará especial atención a la trilogía Literary Theory. A Very Short Introduction (1997), The Literary in Theory (2007) y Theory of the Lyric (2015) donde Culler propone el retorno a lo literario sin olvidar las aportaciones de la teoría.Culler defiende la capacidad de la literatura de sustraerse a la determinación de la ideología. En su defensa de esta capacidad se hace sentir tanto la herencia de la estética – la concepción de la imaginación como juego libre de la determinación de las circunstancias materiales y la idea de la conciliación del particular y el universal – como del giro lingüístico. Veremos el alcance de esta posibilidad comparando la textualidad general derrideana, que Culler suscribe, con la “idéalinguisterie”, neologismo acuñado por Alain Badiou para referirse a la reducción de toda realidad a discurso. Concluiremos señalando en qué medida la falta de una teoría de la verdad fuerte impide a Culler ir más allá de la posibilidad de substraerse a la ideología
Umberto Eco, Interpretation and Overinterpretation, with Richard Rorty, Jonathan Culler and Christine Brooke-Rose (Book review)
No full textDebates concerning methodological issues in literary interpretation may not be at the forefront of current thinking in literary studies, but if this is so it is by no means because the issues have been satisfactorily resolved.
They clearly have not. None the less, there seems to be a majority view, whether it is based on assumptions built into various forms of neopragmatist reader-response criticism, deconstructionist criticism, or a criticism influenced by philosophical hermeneutics, that literary texts are open to innumerable different interpretations and that anything like a reasonably strict methodology for interpretation as envisaged, for example, by E. D. Hirsch in his Validity in Interpretation in the late sixties, is perhaps neither possible nor desirable.
Ever since Roland Barthes's dictum in his essay 'The death of the author' that to insist on a univocal reading is to invoke the authoritarian figures of God and the Law, literary critics and critical theorists have been reluctant to suggest that the emancipation from the constraints of
reading advocated by Barthes might not have been the kind of revolutionary act Barthes deluded himself into thinking it was. The euphoria of interpretative liberation embodied in Barthes's 1970s radicality prevented (and still prevents) many from recognizing the silliness of some of Barthes's pronouncements. But the times are changing, and it is certainly to be welcomed that someone of the stature and international standing of Umberto Eco, both as a theorist and a creative writer, has made a significant contribution to the reopening of the question of methodological standards and criteria of literary interpretation in his three Tanner Lectures, delivered in Cambridge in 1990 in front of a very large audience.
The three lectures, in a slightly revised form, have now been published by Cambridge University Press, together with one essay each by Richard Rorty, Jonathan Culler, and Christine Brooke-Rose as contributing seminarists. Also included in the volume is a substantive and very useful introductory piece by the editor Stefan Collini and a relatively short reply to the seminarists' essays by Eco.Arts, Education & Law Group, School of Humanities, Languages and Social SciencesNo Full Tex
Over interpretatie
No full textRecensie van: Umberto Eco, Over interpretatie. Met bijdragen van Richard Rorty, Jonathan Culler en Christine Brooke-Rose. Kok Agora, Kampen 1992.Recensie van: Umberto Eco, Over interpretatie. Met bijdragen van Richard Rorty, Jonathan Culler en Christine Brooke-Rose. Kok Agora, Kampen 1992
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