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.[2]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. It has been translated into 26 languages, including Kurdish, Latvian, and Albanian. Instead of chapters on critical schools and their methods, the book's eight chapters address issues and problems of literary theory.
His Theory of the Lyric (2015) approaches the Western lyric tradition, from SapphotoAshbery, exploring the major parameters of the genre and contesting two dominant models of the lyric: lyric as the intense expression of the author's affective experience, and lyric as the fictional representation of the speech act of a persona. Both these models, according to Culler, are extremely limiting and ignore the specifically poetic aspects of lyric poetry, such as rhythm and sound patterning.
Culler believes that the linguistic-structuralist model can help "formulate the rules of particular systems of convention rather than simply affirm their existence." He posits language and human culture as similar.
InStructuralist Poetics Culler warns against applying the technique of linguistics directly to literature. Rather, the "'grammar' of literature" is converted into literary structures and meaning. Structuralism is defined as a theory resting on the realization that if human actions or productions have meaning there must be an underlying system that makes this meaning possible, since an utterance has meaning only in the context of a preexistent system of rules and conventions.
Culler proposes that we use literary critical theory not to try to understand a text but rather to investigate the activity of interpretation. In several of his works, he speaks of a reader who is particularly "competent". In order to understand how we make sense of a text, Culler identifies common elements that different readers treat differently in different texts. He suggests there are two classes of readers, "the readers as field of experience for the critic (himself a reader)" and the future readers who will benefit from the work the critic and previous readers have done.
Culler's critics complain of his lack of distinction between literature and the institution of writing in general. John R. Searle has described Culler's presentation of deconstruction as making "Derrida look both better and worse than he really is;" better in glossing over some of the more intellectually murky aspects of deconstruction and worse in largely ignoring the major philosophical progenitors of Derrida's thought, namely Husserl and Heidegger.[5]
Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty. London: Elek Books; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974. Revised edition: Cornell University Press, 1985.
Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975. Revised edition: Routledge Classics, 2002. Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese, Chinese, and Croatian translations.
Saussure (American Title: Ferdinand de Saussure). London: Fontana Modern Masters; Brighton: Harvester, 1976. New York: Penguin, 1977. Second revised edition, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986; London: Fontana, 1987. Japanese, Serbian, Slovenian, Portuguese, Turkish, and Finnish translations.
The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981. Revised edition, "Routledge Classics", Routledge, 2001, Cornell University Press, 2002. Japanese translation.
On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982; London: Routledge, 1983. Japanese, Spanish, Italian, German, Portuguese, Serbian, Chinese, Polish, Korean, Hungarian, and Czech translations.
Barthes (American Title: Roland Barthes). London: Fontana Modern Masters; New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. French, Japanese, Portuguese, and Chinese translations. Revised and expanded edition, Roland Barthes: A Very Short Introduction, OUP, Oxford, 2001.
ed. The Call of the Phoneme: Puns and the Foundations of Letters. Oxford: Blackwells, and Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987.
Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions. Oxford: Blackwells, and Norman, U of Oklahoma Press, 1988. Japanese translation.
Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997; reedition 1999. Polish, Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, Italian, German, Spanish, Croatian, Japanese, Romanian, French, and Latvian translations.
Ed., with Kevin Lamb, Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.
^ abcShea, Victor (1993). "Jonathan Dwight Culler". In Makaryk, Irene Rima (ed.), Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory: Approaches, Scholars, Terms, p. 283-84. University of Toronto Press. ISBN0-8020-6860-X.
^Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975), pp. viii-ix.
^"Jonathan D. Culler". Department of English Cornell Arts & Sciences. Retrieved 30 March 2017.
^Searle, John R. "The Word Turned Upside Down" The New York Review of Books, Volume 30, Number 16, October 27, 1983
Terry Beers, "Reading Reading Constraints: Conventions, Schemata, and Literary Interpretation", Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism 18 (1988), pp. 82–93
J. Culler, The Literary in Theory. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007
J. Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997
J. Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul/Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975. Revised edition: Routledge Classics, 2002
D. Gorman, "Theory of What?", rev. of Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, Jonathan Culler, Philosophy and Literature 23.1 (1999), pp. 206–216
E. Schauber and E. Spolsky, "Stalking a Generative Poetics" New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation 12.3 (1981): 397-413
R. Schleifer and G. Rupp, "Structuralism", The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism 2nd ed. (2005)
