بوطیقای ساخت‌گرا

by Jonathan D. Culler

Structuralist poetics : structuralism, linguistics and the study of literature, c2002, Jonathan Culler
عنوان: بوطیقای ساختگرا: ساختگرایی، زبان شناسی و مطالعه ادبیات؛ نویسنده: جاناتان کالر؛ مترجم: کورش صفوی؛ مشخصات نشر: تهران، مینوی خرد، 1388، شابک: 9786009023097؛ در 461 ص، واژه نامه دارد، کتابنامه از ص 421 تا 443، نمایه دارد، عنوان دیگر: ساختگرایی، زبان شناسی و مطالعه ادبیات؛ موضوع: ساختگرایی ؛ تحلیل ادبی ؛ زبانشناسی، نقد

Genres: Literary Criticism, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Theory, Linguistics, Literature, Criticism

462 pages, Hardcover

First published March 13, 1975

About the author

Culler's Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature won the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association of America in 1976 for an outstanding book of criticism. Structuralist Poetics was one of the first introductions to the French structuralist movement available in English.

Culler’s contribution to the Very Short Introductions series, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, received praise for its innovative technique of organization. Instead of chapters to schools and their methods, the book's eight chapters address issues and problems of literary theory.

In The Literary in Theory (2007) Culler discusses the notion of Theory and literary history’s role in the larger realm of literary and cultural theory. He defines Theory as an interdisciplinary body of work including structuralist linguistics, anthropology, Marxism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and literary criticism.

Reviews

[Alok Mishra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Culler's work demystifies Barthes, adds clarity to the theory of structuralism and also shows the way forward to those who are bewildered by the signs, conundrums of signs and the signified. It is a work of repute. I suggest this book for students of literary theory in their advanced stages.

[Andrew Noselli · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you believe that defamilization with nature provides one with a greater share of access to reality, then structuralism is simply not going to be enough for you and, in consequence, you must become a postmodernist. However you are to be cautioned that, in taking the postmodern turn, you are setting yourself up for even more hardship and disappointment as I see it. To explain myself fully, I should say that you should read this book which, in my opinion, was the first bombshell in the re-politicization of literature and the de-poeticization of man. The antecedent to the real, (our English language has no proper designation for it except to say that it is the "really real"), is the re-primitivization of humanity to the point where believing in classical aesthetics and rules of grammar is enough to mark one as a devalued "human type", a type which has since been ruled out of favor or, as Foucault would have it, as a fold in history that has since been smoothed out in the fabric of space-time and one which no longer exists as a source of dimensional freedom. In this book Jonathan Culler demonstrates how Roland Barthes proved that literature can be studied as a science, but not as according to the pre-linguistic structure of classical philology, but according to an analysis of the semic codes of characters, places, objects and thematic groups found in literary objects. The fact that Plato disavowed the use of technology to replace memory suggests that literature can be posited as the source of truth for both the present and the past - and thereby the future, too. With the advance of A.I. and the politically-motivated drive to put an end to humanities-focused education kept in mind, we can see how Culler pointed out, in this book published nearly sixty years ago, how structuralism entailed the overthrowing of the western model of education. Through its attention to the unraveling of the conceptual dualities and binary oppositions and, importantly, as a sort of compensation for the loss of faith in the possibility of overthrowing the repressions inherent in the system of capitalist oppression, structuralism inculcated a certain degree of self-hatred in its practitioners, who were left in a void of silence, even though they worked mightily in their search for new models of modernism which could overcome the dominant forms of oppression contained the bourgeois forms of ideology. Artificial intelligence promises a way out of this conundrum as I see it, but I shall leave that for a different review. Three stars.

[Lily Hardie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Slightly off balance

[Oéb Uêis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mình vô cùng thích!!!! Mặc dù đôi khi có một vài đoạn bị lặp, chỉ một chút thôi, nhưng vẫn rất hay.

[Mahmoud Keshk · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book stands on its own; it's the best I've ever read on Structuralism.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book out of sequence. Over the course of the last couple years, I have read many (almost all) of Culler's later works, but had never tackled this, his seminal, first book on literary theory. Having read those other books, I saw much that was familiar in this book. Because those books often augment or critique this book they even engage with the same texts and concepts. Despite this familiarity, this book was still a stunning read. The body of the book is taken up by two length chapters on the poetics of lyric and the novel (or how to do poetics with verse and with prose). As is usual with Culler, these are full of insightful readings and polemical responses to other critics.

Almost the first 200 pages of the book serve to set up Culler's poetics by interrogating what structuralism is and what it can do with literature. Culler convincingly argues that structuralist poetics cannot simply consist of applying linguistic concepts to analyses of literature. Along the way he critiques the methods of Greimas, Jakobson, and Kristeva among others. Culler proves that literature requires its own method of analysis, but that this method can use insights from linguistics obliquely. Chapters on constructions of the reader and literary conventions make good use of this claim.

Behind all of this, as always with Culler, lies Roland Barthes. Barthes takes up almost two pages of the bibliography and Culler's synthesis of insights from the famous French theorist do a great service to readers who may find the author himself a big fragmentary and inconsistent. Culler's method is ultimately a pragmatic one, and in this text he is at his most judicious. His later work engages much more in the project of post-struturalism, so it is fun to see him so carefully sidestep many of those post-structuralist questions that were arising when the book was published in 1975. This book is definitely an artifact of its age, but there is so much here that it is worth reading now.

[Justin Evans · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Acquired sometime between 1999 and 2004
City Lights Book Shop, London, Ontario

[Tanya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Landmark book that showed yet another way literature could be interpreted.

[Atra Bou · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another view on ho literature could be interpreted. Thanks pr Djemai for the rec.

[Ivan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great explanations and arguments!