Interview with Jonathan Culler (original) (raw)

Literary Studies Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. An Interview with Jonathan Culler

2018

Jonathan Culler stands today as one of the most influential scholars of literature – and historian scholars of literary theory. The following interview provides only the snapshot of Culler’s significant presence and influence through his decades of scholarship and teaching in university classrooms. As we follow his path from Harvard (B.A. 1966) to Oxford (Rhodes Scholar and M.Phil 1968) through to his dissertation work at Oxford (D.Phil. 1972), followed by his directorship of modern languages at Cambridge (1969-1974) to his life-time career at Cornell (since 1977), Culler has singularly dedicated his career to formally exploring the theoretical frameworks that might best open literature to how we as readers explore and create meaning in its apprehension. As such, we see Culler’s scholarly journey zigzag in and through insights from philosophy (Phenomenology, for instance), linguistics, anthropology, and semiotics (Structuralism, for instance).

Saussure’s dichotomies and the shapes of structuralist semiotics

Sign Systems Studies

The Cours de linguistique générale (1916), which became the master text for structuralist linguistics and semiotics, is characterized by a series of dichotomies. Some of them, e.g. langue and parole, signified and signifier, arbitrary and motivated, are very well known, others less so. This paper looks at Saussure’s semiotics in terms of these dichotomies, and considers how later critiques, such as Voloshinov’s (1929), and reformulations, particularly Hjelmslev’s (1935, 1942) and the concept of enunciation which emerged conjointly in the work of Jakobson, Lacan, Dubois, Benveniste and others, were shaped as responses to the Saussurean dichotomies. Also examined in terms of its contrast with Saussure is Bally’s stylistics. The aim is a fuller understanding of the shapes taken by structuralist semiotics, in view of the heritage on which they were based and the broader intellectual climate, including phenomenology and Marxism, in which they developed.