The Crossroads of Critical Consciousness: A Response to Jonathan Culler's "Structuralism and Grammatology"

Abstract

Let me begin by acknowledging my general admiration for Professor Culler's exemplary contributions to a theory of structuralist poetics, a movement that, at the risk of privileging Gallic precedents, might best be considered la nouvelle critique in American literary criticism. I should preface my remarks with the further acknowledgment that I share in the pursuit of a structural poetics, or a semiotic theory generally. Thus, my response will appear more analytical than polemical, although I begin with a critique of certain paradoxical assumptions in Professor Culler's argument as a means to elaborate further the problematic arising from the premises and implications underlying the formalities of structuralism as well as the informalities of deconstruction.