Teoria literară înseamnă contestarea bunului simț pentru Jonathan Culler

Theory is a critique of common sense, of concepts taken as natural.

"The nature of theory is to undo, through a contesting of premises and postulates, what you thought you knew, so the effects of theory are not predictable. You have not become master, but neither are you where you were before. You reflect on your reading in new ways.

Literature, in the sense of a set of works of assured and unalterable value, distinguished by certain shared inherent properties, does not exist. When I use the words 'literary' and 'literature’ from here on in this book, then, I place them under an invisible crossing-out mark, to indicate that these terms will not really do but that we have no better ones at the moment.

This difficultyet interestingbook asserts that theory isnot dead, that theory is litera ture and literature theory.By discussing the 'literariness' (narrative, rhetorical, and performative qualities) in theory,and forms of resistance to theory,Jonathan Culler works against an 'anti-theory'movement, maintaining that theorypromotes interdis ciplinarity.

by Jonathan Culler · On Reading Literature: Literary Theory · If theory is defined by its practical effects, as what changes people’s views, makes them · think differently about their objects of study and their activities of studying them, what · sort of effects are these? The main effect of theory is the disputing of ‘common sense’: commonsense views about ·

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 ...

Culler's vision of literary studies is inclusive and cumulative: it reminds us that 'learning' is both a noun and a verb, both a result and a process. Is theory dead? This book shows that it has a pulse and a sense of humor."—Haun Saussy, Yale University "[Jonathan Culler's] ultimate aim, as his title suggests, is to make his readers aware of the literary (i.e., the special self-reflexive, questioning, skeptical attitude and practice which seeks to understand the conditions of its own possibility) within theory or Theory, which is an interdisciplinary undertaking informed by this attitude or practice.

The theory of poetic influence itself is extremely valuable, and if this book adds little to The Anxiety of Influence it is because it so blatantly fails to live up to its claims: “This book offers instruction in the practical criticism of poetry, in how to read a poem, on the basis of the theory of poetry set forth in my earlier book.” · Bloom once knew what this involved; in the days of The Visionary Company he had some sense of what it might be like to show someone how to read a poem, but he has now effectively slain his past and fully acceded to a new oracular role.

Alwin Baum, The Crossroads of Critical Consciousness: A Response to Jonathan Culler's "Structuralism and Grammatology", boundary 2, Vol. 8, No. 1, The Problems of Reading in Contemporary American Criticism: A Symposium (Autumn, 1979), pp. 87-94