Download On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism by Jonathan Culler PDF

By Jonathan Culler

"Academic literary crticism is still ruled via 'theory' and the fight among deconstructionist and humanist ways to the company of analyzing. Jonathan Culler's On Deconstruction is a more often than not sufferer, considerate, illuminating exposition of the information of Jacques Derrida and their software to literary studies."--David hotel, Commonweal

"Culler is lucid and thorough, can stream into and out of alternative people's arguments with no wasting the experience of his personal voice and argument, and will be able to look both at domestic with Freudianism, feminism, and standard literary criticism."--Times Literary Supplement

"As a practising critic Culler has constantly been a deconstructor, and he methods this subject with specified immediacy and strength. In On Deconstruction he deals beneficiant summaries of various consultant articles and a great annotated bibliography. . . . His magisterial method of tracing specific themes and methods via our diaspora of serious texts, and his provocative analyses, can't fail to concentration any critic's considering deconstruction."--Modern Language Quarterly

"Gifted with grace and readability, Culler presents us with a stimulating survey of latest literary criticism."--Antioch overview

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28 Just as Tanner says little of Julie as an epistolary novel, so he does not acknowledge the significance of the Novelle for Elective Affinities. Instead, he treats it as if it differed little from what he loosely calls the 'bourgeois novel'. In drawing attention, for instance, to 'the level of generality, verging on allegory, on which the book is conducted' (184), he refers to a central feature of the Novelle form, but apparently without recognizing that this is what it is. The result is that he gives disproportionate emphasis to qualities that are intrinsic to the form rather than peculiar to Goethe's novel.

Here Eduard and Charlotte, the married couple at its centre, have sex while each is thinking of another with whom they are in love: Eduard of Ottilie, Charlotte of the Captain. As Tanner argues, what is so unsettling about this episode is its suggestion 'not just that married sexual activity may effectively be adulterous sexual activity but that it may not in fact be possible to tell - or to keep - them apart' (191). com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-11 36 37 desire and in exploring some of the most searching implications of that conflict.

While, within Tanner's terms of reference, Julie's account of her father's behaviour could be read as implying suppressed desire on his part rather than hers, the key fantasy that requires attention is authorial, ideological, and cultural. Tanner's interpretation succeeds in establishing that the novel underscores the power of the father. It also suggests, more debatably, that the source of that power lies in sexual desire that culture requires to be repressed. What it leaves out are other sources of the father's power, and Rousseau's own agency in figuring them.

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