Jonathan D. Culler

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 show more 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. show less

Although Culler's 'very short' (in fact, perfectly sufficient) introduction to literary theory is certainly about literary theory, it also covers much greater ground - 'Theory' itself and its derivatives, cultural studies, feminist theory, gender studies and anti-colonialist theory.

This is because the Academy was drawn deeply into this territory in the latter quarter of the last century. The contemporary study of literature cannot be seriously understood without understanding the incursions show more into it of these external elements.

As someone who is deeply resistant to the cultural imperialism of Theory and its transformation of thought into ideology, I found Culler's guide to be fair-minded and reasonable, outlining the state of literary theory at the end of the last century without taking any particular partisan position.

As a result I can (whatever one's views on what has happened to Western culture) recommend the book as a decent guide to the facts of what has happened. Indeed, it is quite an achievement to cover so much ground so clearly with only very few obscurities in a discipline filled with the latter.

To his credit, he does see the wood for the trees. Although it is more than it promises in its title, he does not neglect the discussion of literature qua literature and he is careful to present more traditional views of writing and text alongside the more fashionable ones.

As a result, for once in my reviews, I do not feel I have to 'critique a critique' but can simply let the text lie as a useful guide - whatever private despair I may feel at the ideologisation of culture by an excess of over-wrought junior academics and their politicised confreres. show less

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 show more 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). show less

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 show more 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. show less