7 Quotes by Jonathan Culler

You can be involved with theory; you can teach or study theory; you can hate theory or be afraid of it. None of this, though, helps much to understand what theory is.

This view of literature as an aesthetic object that could make us ‘better people’ is linked to a certain idea of the subject, to what theorists have come to call ‘the liberal subject’, the individual defined not by a social situation and interests but by an individual subjectivity (rationality and morality) conceived as essentially free of social determinants.

Meaning is context bound, but context is boundless.

The poem is a structure of signifiers which absorbs and reconstitutes the signified.

Poetry lies at the centre of the literary experience because it is the form that most clearly asserts the specificity of literature.

Los Angeles makes the rest of California seem authentic.

With its shrewd analysis and its knowledgeable reflections on the state of the arts, as well as a rich array of anecdotes and quotations about patronage, Patronizing the Arts will appeal to a broad audience.