The Literary in Theory (review)

In this wide-ranging study, Jonathan Culler gives us an engaging overview of the interdependency of “literature” and “theory” that configures the contemporary academic scene. Over and against the popular claim that theory is dead, Culler declares that “literary and cultural studies are very much in theory these days, even if theory itself is not seen as the cutting edge,” not prominent as a “vanguard movement” (2). Rather, theory constitutes a pervasive “discursive space within which literary and cultural studies now occur” (3). While many anti-theorists have claimed that theory eclipses literature and literary values as such, Culler suggests, on the other hand, that it generally alerts us to versions of “literariness” at work in discourse and thereby reaffirms the centrality of “the literary” itself (5).

In its early days, theory meant, above all, the theory of literature. However, the formalism of the Russian formalists and French structuralists, which engendered a genuine “poetics,” was soon quickly superseded in the American academy by a “poststructuralism” committed to theory, as such, rather than to the process of systematization. Literature itself was subsequently relegated to the role of handmaiden, at best—or so it appeared to many working in the discipline. As its title suggests, Culler’s book aims, above all, to reverse this understanding, “to articulate the role of the literary in theory” and, at the same time, enhance our understanding of certain theoretical concepts that inform our sense of “literariness” today (14).

The book falls into three parts. Part 1 (“Theory”), chapter 1 (“The Literary in Theory”) contains the argument that the literary has migrated from being the object of theory—for example, structuralism—to being, in some sense, the “quality” of theory itself (38). Hence, philosophical texts have, themselves, become literary. Theory, in other words, informs disciplines of both the “fictionality” and “performative efficacy” of their constructions (41). In this sense, the literary has, indeed, triumphed. Chapter 2, “The Novel and the Nation,” addresses Benedict Anderson’s discussion of the nation as an “imagined community” made possible, in part, by novelistic narration, concluding that the formal adumbration of this space—that is, the novel’s very form—constitutes the condition of possibility for imagining the nation, not the novel’s content as representation of a nation (72). In chapter 3, “Resisting Theory,” Culler explores Paul de Man’s argument that nothing can overcome the resistance to theory “since theory is itself this resistance” (73). Resistance calls theory to account, regarding which de Man engaged significant questions about “allegory,” “romanticism,” “blindness and insight,” the “constative” and “performative” dimensions of language, and the critique of “aesthetic ideology” (85).

Part 2, “Concepts,” investigates various theoretical notions—specifically those of text, sign, performativity, interpretation, and omniscience. Chapter 4, “Texts: Its Vicissitudes,” examines the idea of the text from its structuralist moment, where anything can be a text, through its reconfiguration in the thinking of Fredric Jameson, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, and Paul de Man, with preference given to Derrida and de Man’s aporetic structure. In chapter 5, “The Sign: Saussure and Derrida on Arbitrariness,” Culler contrasts Saussure’s deployment of “motivation” (aka “grammar”) as the very principle that drives the linguistic system with Derrida’s structure of différance—an originary trace that constitutes the condition of possibility of signs. Chapter 6, “The Performative,” considers this concept from its inception in the thinking of J. L. Austin through its subsequent modification by literary theorists and critics such as Derrida, de Man, and Judith Butler “to describe first literary discourse and later a wide range of discursive productions, including identity itself ” (140). Chapter 7, “Interpretation: Defending ‘Over-interpretation,’” traces the emergence and successive history of “interpretation” from its decisive moment in Northrop Frye’s attack on “intentionality,” what Frye called the “Little Jack Horner” view of criticism, through its elaborations in the pragmatic analyses of Richard Rorty in response to Umberto Eco, to its eventual dismissal in the work of Stanley Fish, and finally argues—unlike Fish, who, in his later...