Originality of Jonathan Culler
In the intellectual history of the late 20th century, Jonathan Culler holds a unique and often misunderstood position. He is frequently cast as a mere popularizer—a brilliant synthesizer, perhaps—who acted as the primary conduit for complex French theory (namely, structuralism and deconstruction) into the Anglophone academy. While this role as interlocutor is undeniable, to limit Culler's contribution to that of a mere explicator is to miss his profound methodological originality. Culler's true intervention was not to apply linguistics to literature, but to correct the flawed attempts of his contemporaries and, in doing so, to redefine the very object of literary criticism. 1. The Methodological Correction The first wave of structuralist criticism, inspired by Ferdinand de Saussure's linguistics and the formalist work of Roman Jakobson, was engaged in what Culler identified as a categorical error. Critics would take a single poem and subject it to an exhaustive linguistic a...