Reading: Jonathan Culler: Structuralist Poetics

Quotes of interesting things he has to say.

Page 58-59

There is a sense in which the resolution of oppositions that takes
place in a metaphor is the thought of the poem itself rather than the thought of a group of readers, and the critic studying the structure of that poem or a series of poems does not begin by taking surveys to discover the reaction of readers. The reason is that texts have meaning for those who know how to read them - those who, in their encounters with literature, have assimilated the conventions that are constitutive of literature as an institution and a means of communication. It is in terms of literature or poetry that poems have meaning, and one could say, paraphrasing Lévi-Strauss, that the critics's task is to show 'comment la literature se pense dans le hommes'.

Page 60

Taken as a theory of reading, Levi-Strauss's account of myth offers the student of literature the rare spectacle of an attempt to invent and test conventions for the reading of fictional discourse. Since myth and literature share, at the very least, a 'logic of concrete', one should consider his proposals concerning the reading of myth as hypotheses about semiotic operations that may be performed intuitevily in the reading of literature.

Page 61

[...] in order to make text signify, organizes its elements into
oppositional series which can then be correlated with other oppositions. This process has one extremely important consequence: the extraction of pertinent features leaves a residue which can itself be organized into various oppositions, producing the kind of plurivalency or ambiguity that many have taken to be constitutive of literary language.

Page 62

There can be little doubt that in reading poems or novels one does establish a hierarhcy of semantic features. We may interpret statements about the weather as metaphors for states of mind, but none ever read statements about moods as metaphors for the weather. The opposition between good and bad weather is not, shall we say, recognized as fundamental in itself and therefore is taken as expressing some other, more important contrast. One of the tasks of criticism might be to determine what semantic features enjoy this priviledged status and seem worthy to serve as the ultimate signifiés of symbols.

Page 62

The very oddity of the myths he [Levi-Strauss] cites, the difficulty of achieving what we would ordinarily think of as satisfactory understanding, makes clear just how much we rely, in the reading texts from western culture, on a series of codes and conventions of which we are not fully aware.

(Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics, Routledge 2002)