The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction by Jonathan Culler, ISBN-13: 978-0801487934
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- Publisher: Cornell University Press; Augmented edition (March 19, 2002)
- Language: English
- 272 pages
- ISBN-10: 0801487935
- ISBN-13: 978-0801487934
To gain a deeper understanding of the literary movement that has dominated recent Anglo-American literary criticism, The Pursuit of Signs is a must. In a world increasingly mediated, it offers insights into our ways of consuming texts that are both brilliant and bold. Dancing through semiotics, reader-response criticism, the value of the apostrophe and much more, Jonathan Culler opens up for every reader the closed world of literary criticism. Its impact on first publication, in 1981, was immense; now, as Mieke Bal notes, ‘the book has the same urgency and acuity that it had then’, though today it has even wider implications: ‘with the interdisciplinary turn taking hold, literary theory itself, through this book, becomes a much more widespread tool for cultural analysis’.
The primary task of literary theory, Jonathan Culler asserts in the new edition of his classic in this field, is not to illuminate individual literary works but to explain the system of literary signification―the rules and conventions that determine a reader’s understanding of a text and that make literary communication possible. In this wide-ranging book, he investigates the possibilities of a semiotics of literature. A new preface places The Pursuit of Signs in the context of major developments in the study of literature since publication of the original Cornell edition in 1981.
Jonathan Culler is Class of 1961 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. He is past president of the American Comparative Literature Association and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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