Jonathan Culler Quotes & Sayings

Los Angeles makes the rest of California seem authentic. — Jonathan Culler

After illuminating the work of Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Louise Bourgeois, Balthus, and other modern artists, Mieke Bal again demonstrates her extraordinary flair for cultural criticism in taking on the work of Doris Salcedo, exploring the philosophical and aesthetic stakes of this committed political art and the relation between beauty, violence, and memory. A tour de force. — Jonathan Culler

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

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. — Jonathan Culler

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

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. — Jonathan Culler

. . . 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. — Jonathan Culler

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. — Jonathan Culler

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. — Jonathan Culler

Meaning is context bound, but context is boundless — Jonathan Culler