Jonathan D. CullerReseñas

This was very dry reading but at least I now know what I would be in for when approaching anything labeled or described as Literary Theory. So if you're in the least bit interested in literary theory but don't know where to start, this is probably the best place. At least when you're finished you'll definitely know if you want to proceed any further with the subject.

There were parts where I think I grasped the point but would have welcomed more examples, there were other parts where I had no idea what was being said.½

I rarely rate others' work, and I'm certainly not going to rate this one. Let me just say that I've now read it twice, that I'm still learning from it, and that I wish any one of the teachers I'd had for related subjects had thought to offer some of the systematic views that are provided in this small book.

Very short, very concise book about literary theory. I knew nothing about literary theory until I read this book. It gave some good summaries of deconstuction and structuralism, constative and performative sentences, for example. Some of the chapters made more sense to me than others. I was reading this in conjunction with The Marriage Plot as Madeleine takes some literary theory and semiotics classes.

I'd like to know more, this book was a little TOO concise but it was the one available at the library. Since this is my first introduction to literary theory, I won't be able to comment too much on the pros/cons of this book until I've read more.

Next up - Derrida??

This is a fantastic li'l Lit Theory book. It is short, but rather than superficially skimming the surface of as many theoretical schools as possible, Culler takes a more interesting (and page appropriate) approach by encountering those different schools through an exploration of lit theory's practical concerns. You get chapters like "What is Theory?" and "Language, Meaning, and Interpretation," and as a result of his method, you actually do end up coming across some of the main lines of thinking that these theoretical schools identify with, only you do it with an organic understanding of critical theory's overall nature and purpose.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who reads and/or has even a slight interest in literary or cultural studies. Jonathan Culler does more in 120 pages than most others do in 500.

This is a fantastic li'l Lit Theory book. It is short, but rather than superficially skimming the surface of as many theoretical schools as possible, Culler takes a more interesting (and page appropriate) approach by encountering those different schools through an exploration of lit theory's practical concerns. You get chapters like "What is Theory?" and "Language, Meaning, and Interpretation," and as a result of his method, you actually do end up coming across some of the main lines of thinking that these theoretical schools identify with, only you do it with an organic understanding of critical theory's overall nature and purpose.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who reads and/or has even a slight interest in literary or cultural studies. Jonathan Culler does more in 120 pages than most others do in 500.

This is a very successful attempt to comprehensively convey the thinking of a chameleon such as the French (post) structuralist Roland Barthes (1915-1980). Jonathan Culler nicely separates the different aspects of Barthes' personality and work and also sketches the evolution he went through. He is not afraid to point to the contradictions in that work and he clearly expresses his preference for the systematic scientist that Barthes was at the start of his career, the semiotic, in comparison with the multiformity of his later oeuvre. For indeed, that someone who once pronounced "the death of the author" returned to a penetrating study of authors such as Flaubert and Proust at the end of his career can provoke astonishment. But Culler makes clear that although Barthes may be placed in the list of structuralists such as Levi-Strauss, Foucault and Lacan, he always remained his wayward self. The only thing I missed in this booklet was the link that can clearly be found between French semiotics and what is called "the linguistic turn" in Anglo-Saxon circles (Hayden White and others).½

Well it really didn't teach me anything new, but it did help organize all the literary theory bits that I have bouncing around my brain that I get from listening to Steph complain about school. But I still don't care about learning thinkers' names and quoting from them.

well, after reading this I am not really any wiser what literary theory is... the answer the book gives is "it depends"

Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, as you might have guessed by the title, gives you a quick overview on the importance of literary theory. It is a little introduction on the history and the progression of literary studies. It was interesting how the book looked at literary criticism as a field of studies that is losing a battle to cultural studies. Even thought this field steams from the study of literature, people seem more interested in studying music, movies and TV than literature. Cultural studies seem to be pushing out literary studies and, sadly, the two fields may merge.

I got the broad-brush strokes on literary theory from this book but it never really explored any literary movements in great detail. I really wanted to learn more about the different schools of thought. The book provides a basic idea of what each school is focusing on; “‘the class struggle’ (Marxism), ‘the possibility of unifying experience’ (the new criticism), ‘Oedipal conflict’ (psychoanalysis), ‘the containment of subversive energies’ (new historicism), ‘the asymmetry of gender relations’ (feminism), ‘the self-deconstructive nature of the text’ (deconstruction), ‘the occlusion of imperialism’ (postcolonial theory), ‘the heterosexual matrix’ (gay and lesbian studies).” This did allow me to have a general idea of the schools but I suspect there is a lot more complexity to them. Also this is a very small sample of the different schools of thought; probably just the more popular ones..

In the end I found the most informative section of the book to be the appendix, which had a brief definition of most of the literary schools of thought. This was the information that I was looking for but the book did provide a decent starting point for someone like me. I know I will need to read a lot more about literary theory but I’m starting to get a handle on what to expect. I know I’ll never be an expert in all fields but the more I learn, the more I understand each school of thought in a basic sense.

I feel like my interests will be focused on psychoanalysis and Marxism. I like the idea of using psychology to analyse characters in a book; it could be dark and twisted and that is the type of thing I’m interested in. You only have to see my opinions on Frankenstein and Crime and Punishment to see that. I’m also interested in the social structure and how society affects the characters, so I think Marxism will be an interesting field of study as well; it will also have the added bonus of freaking out my in-laws.

This A Very Short Introduction series of books are a great idea, I can see myself trying out some different ones in different ranges of topics. They don’t just focus on literature, you can learn about religion, sociology, music, history, psychology, science and so much more. I plan to try out a few more of the books; I’m thinking the one on Marx might be my next choice. They are short and if you prefer they are also available as audiobooks.

This review originally appeared on my blog; http://literary-exploration.com/2014/06/06/literary-theory-a-very-short-introduc...

Culler makes a great case for what we can learn from structuralism (how to avoid the 'unseemly rush from word to world'), and, perhaps more importantly right now, what we can't (positivism on the one hand, and relativism on the other). Can't wait to read his book on deconstruction.

I read this after Culler's 'Structuralist Poetics' book, and it's more or less more of the same: excellent exposition of the theory in question, which reads like walking through knee deep oatmeal. What's odd is that you'd expect a book like this to be full of 60's French nonsense prose. Instead, it's clear but extraordinarily dull Anglo-academic prose. I doubt there's a better introduction, although I'm not sold on his claim that the post-structuralism/structuralism distinction is unhelpful.

Culler's introduction to Barthes is better than Barthes' actual ideas; the older Roland got the more nonsensical and silly his ideas got... and then he got hit by a laundry truck, one of the silliest deaths in intellectual history. Culler's analysis is sympathetic but also critical. It might be a good idea for most intellectuals to read this, because his criticism of Barthes' late infatuation with 'the body' is relevant to so many of them/us: why bother going through ideology critique, why bother revealing the way that we all treat out beliefs about the world as natural facts about the world, if you're just going to base your thought on a quasi-natural concept like the body? Nice for you that you can hold onto that liberal-conservative world-view and justify it by such a 'radical' epistemology; not so nice for those who don't benefit from that liberal-conservative world-view.

This isn't a substitute for reading Barthes, but it did a good job of encouraging me to read Mythologies and S/Z. Not much more you could ask for from a meta-literary-critic.

This little book takes away much of the confusion of its topic, and makes it a bit easier to accept or reject some of the many concepts proposed by theorists.

Very useful idea for a reference book, great choice of subject matter, nice compact size. Horrible writing style. There were sentences so convoluted in here I reread them thrice over just to make sure I wasn't imagining things or going blind.

This book was more so heavily skimmed than read, but not sure it will ever get a more entrenched reading later...

I loved that Culler organized the work thematically rather than by critical schools. Given that many of the best theorists overlap in many fields--is Judith Butler a psychoanalyst or feminist? is Althusser a structuralist or Marxist? and what is Foucault?--I think Culler's approach best represents how theory actually works. After all, poststructuralism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis tend to do much the same thing in a theoretical context: they all call 'the natural' (of language, of the state and economics, of the personality) into question and thereby transform the self into subject. That denaturalization is the key difference from what came before, not the differences between, say, a politically informed and a merely linguistic poststructuralism.

Moreover, even though it originally appeared about 10 years ago, its refusal to split theory into various schools preserved it from obsolescence. The pure Lacanian died out in 1999 or so, and now the best critics draw on everything.

Highly recommended. This is probably the one I'll assign.

A novel approach to literary theory as the book begins by focusing on the kinds of interpretive 'moves' that happen in literary theory. Chapters cover what liverature is and why it matters; literature and cultural studies; language, meaning and interpretation; rhetorics, poetics and poetry; narrative; performative language; identity, indetification and subject. A final appendix covers theoretical schools and movements.

I'm not convinced I'm any the wiser for having read this book, or even much better informed.½

Roland Barthes (1915-1980) was an 'incomparable enlivener of the literary mind' whose lifelong fascination was with 'the way people make their world intelligible'. He has a multi-faceted claim to fame: to some he is the structuralist who outlined a 'science of literature', and the most prominent promoter of semiology; to others he stands not for science but for pleasure, espousing that literature which gives the reader a creative role. He championed the Nouveau Roman but his best known works deal with classic writers such as Racine and Balzac. He called for 'the death of the author', urging that we study not writers but texts; yet he himself published idiosyncratic books rightly celebrated as imaginative products of a personal vision.

[The author] elucidates the varied theoretical contributions of this 'public experimenter' and describe the many projects which Barthes explored and which helped change the way we think about a range of cultural phenomena, from literature, fashion, wrestling and advertising to notions of the self, of history and of nature.

Really nice to have in your pocket when writing a critical paper. Easy to read and follow, has major schools of thought covered.

This book is actually part of a series from the Oxford University Press dedicated to introducing things... well, very shortly. Culler concentrates not on the different schools of theory (though he does go over them briefly in an appendix), but more the whys and hows. Despite his best efforts, I, an English graduate student, still feel somewhat baffled by the whole thing, but it's a very readable book, and I at least have a somewhat better inkling of all this malarkey than I did before.

One of the clearest and most concise summaries of theory I've encountered. It's also remarkably broad and in-depth for its length (although of course it cannot be fully comprehensive at a mere 130 pages).½