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“... the curiosity of mass journals like Newsweek. Amidst this swirl of publicity and controversy, Jonathan Culler has managed to remain calm long enough to write a reasoned defence of deconstruction, one from which both scholars and general readers will be able to learn a good deal. Culler is fairly termed an apologist ...”

“... and institutional needs that have no logical connection with Derrida’s philosophy. Indeed Jonathan Culler rightly says in his workmanlike book that Derrida has not dealt with the ‘task of literary criticism’ and that ‘the implications of deconstruction for the study of literature are far from clear.’ In fact, Derrida’s philosophy has no ...”

“... us about narrative, and what does Genette tell us about Proust? In answer to the first question, Jonathan Culler has written a brief and cogent foreword, in which he develops the substantial claim that Genette has given us the first ‘systematic theory of narrative’. Equally appropriate, and perhaps more congenial to this particular insomniac, is the ...”

“... that are the active principle of the rhetoric of the discourse that the analysand in fact utters? Jonathan Culler also, when he comes to treat of the arch-deconstructivist Jacques Derrida, finds himself constrained to adopt a ‘double strategy’ in order to describe, without misrepresenting, Derrida’s work. ‘Even the most subtle and scrupulous ...”

“... the dots into a coherent picture requires a broad brush and some pretty bold splashes of paint. Jonathan Culler’s Theory of the Lyric aims to show that Wellek was wrong, and that it is possible to make transhistorical claims about lyric. Culler is a veteran of the theory wars of the 1970s and 1980s, when he wrote ...”

“... are wrong, and those who insist on it are wrong too. It’s not easy to win in such a competition. Jonathan Culler’s job is to portray him as a Modern Master – even Thody speaks of Barthes as a ‘major French writer’ without any sort of qualification – and he does this with subtlety and skill. There are many modes of mastery and ...”

“... overcoming all the gender-based habits and assumptions imposed by a rigidly patriarchal culture? Jonathan Culler argues as much in the opening chapters of his recent book On Deconstruction. For Culler, this serves as a paradigm case of the way that deconstructionist strategies of reading can work to undo such ...”

“... In reviewing a book on literary theory recently, a noted American structuralist, Jonathan Culler, drew a stern line between the sort of assumptions about literature that might do for ordinary ‘readers’ and those that are currently giving ‘vitality’, as he put it, to ‘literary studies’. The point is well taken; and it also casts a certain light on the present book, Deconstruction and Criticism, as well as on the general condition (and conditions) of American academic ‘vitality ...”

“... referent, as when Mark Cousins compares historical scholarship to jurisprudence, or Jonathan Culler discusses the institutional bases of the American university, as compared with its British counterpart. Yet there is one uproarious contribution, in which William Pietz contrives to put humour as well as considerable insight into his ...”

“... that all interpretation is necessarily misinterpretation (reduced by calmer exponents such as Jonathan Culler to the uncontentious assertion that no interpretation can ever be final), and the dashing new formulation of the old problem of intention – Ellis argues with force and clarity. Moreover he happens to believe that some writings are more ...”

“... the performances of Leavis, Graham Hough and Cleanth Brooks on ‘Tears, Idle Tears’; and of Jonathan Culler and Terence Hawkes on William Carlos Williams’s ‘This is Just to Say’. Theories of Structuralism make Gribble particularly angry. He quotes a bit from Roland Barthes only to say he finds it impenetrable. A long paragraph from ...”

“... What Harrison should have known, however, was that the same argument was already used by Jonathan Culler ten years ago. The real question that needed to be asked was this: what is it about this system of thought that requires the repeated denials that even its own devotees really understand it, and that its founder said what he plainly did ...”

“... that the vision is itself disseminated and dispersed. The weight of allusion is so great that Jonathan Culler remarks, in Structuralism and Since, that Dissemination is ‘Derrida’s most forbidding and difficult book’.If the reader is familiar with Derrida’s earlier work, though, there are enough cues in Dissemination to see what is going ...”

“... theories. It lasted from 1967 to 1976, attracting what for us now are some very familiar names – Jonathan Culler, Christopher Norris, Annette Lavers, Stephen Heath etc – and under his guidance, we gather, they all got on extremely well, ‘preserving a tone of good humour in the midst of the most serious, even the most fierce, exchanges’. Kermode ...”

“... the present deconstructors. What he resists is the desire – recently and forcefully expressed by Jonathan Culler – to have done with the endless old business of ‘interpreting’ texts. As one whose main professional pleasures have come from ‘finding out what texts seemed to be saying as it were voluntarily’, Kermode declares himself unwilling to ...”