Jonathan Culler: Unscrambling The Age Of Pluralism

This dissertation is firmly grounded upon Jonathan Culler's thought on literary studies and criticism. To"avoid overgeneralization"as promoted by Culler, we explore his critical ideas in terms of both form (referring to the pivotal anchoring points and its characteristics of Culler's literary studies and criticism) and content (his three transformations in thinking and keyword studies). In so doing, it is anticipated that Culler's critical thoughts could be fished out in a more comprehensive way, and his influence on literary studies and criticism could thus be traced.At present, no systematic study focusing on Jonathan Culler has been found abroad and only very scarce and randomized interviews or book reviews could be located. Similarly, in China, Culler's study is dominated by translations or reviews from various scholars and it is also very rare to find a systematic study in this respect.In view of such fact, we attempt to base our study on all Culler's works, selected articles and numerous prefaces (e.g., for Empson), which are further complemented by book reviews from those celebrated scholars both abroad and at home. By doing so, our emphasis is placed on"How Culler says"and"Why he says so"rather than"What he says". Accordingly, Chapter One briefly introduces who Jonathan Culler is and what he has written; Chapter Two intends to formulate a framework to describe his colorful journey of literary studies and criticism, by illustrating his cutting points, objectives, modes of analysis and attitudes in or towards literary study and criticism; Chapter Three further highlights Culler's sophisticated maneuvering practices in his three transformations in thinking, which is achieved by comparing Culler with such critics as Frederic Jameson, Robert Scholes, Christopher Norris, Vincent Leitch and Terry Eagleton. Chapter Four deals with"Keyword studies", trying to comb through those essential concepts in Culler's linguistics,"Poetics"and"Theory"studies; Furthermore, Chapter Five compares Culler with Frederic Jameson and J. Hillis Miller, to detect the underlying characteristics featured in Culler's studies; Chapter Six serves as the conclusion part, discussing Culler's theoretical contributions and possible trends in his literary studies and criticism with reference to his critical practices.Generally speaking, Culler has integrated literary theory, literary criticism and literary study into his critical practices in an efficient way. On the contrary, these three studies are clearly separated in Chinese contexts. Though Culler's critical practices does not justify the integration option for Chinese criticism, we still hope that a systematic study on Culler may, to some extent, contribute a little to literary study and criticism in China.