Jonathan Culler Quotes

This view of literature as an aesthetic object that could make us 'better people' is linked to a certain idea of the subject, to what theorists have come to call 'the liberal subject', the individual defined not by a social situation and interests but by an individual subjectivity (rationality and morality) conceived as essentially free of social determinants.

Meaning is context bound, but context is boundless

Los Angeles makes the rest of California seem authentic.

. . . literature is not frivolous pseudo-statements but takes its place among the acts of language that transform the world, bringing into being the things that they name.

With its shrewd analysis and its knowledgeable reflections on the state of the arts, as well as a rich array of anecdotes and quotations about patronage, Patronizing the Arts will appeal to a broad audience.

Poetry lies at the centre of the literary experience because it is the form that most clearly asserts the specificity of literature.

The poem is a structure of signifiers which absorbs and reconstitutes the signified.

The meaning of a work is not what the author had in mind at some point, nor is it simply a property of the text or the experience of a reader. Meaning is an inescapable notion because it is not something simple or simply determined. It is simultaneously an experience of a subject and a property of a text. It is both what we understand and what in the text we try to understand.

Communication depends on the basic convention that participants are cooperating with one another and that, therefore, what one person says to the other is likely to be relevant.