Experimental Critical Theory: Jonathan Culler Zoom Talk
Monday, January 26
3:00-4:30pm PST
Via Zoom
Advanced Registration
Advanced registration is required by Friday, January 23. The Zoom meeting link will be sent end of day on January 23, 2026.
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The 2025-2026 Experimental Critical Theory seminar (COM LIT 250) is taught by Professor Eleanor Kaufman and offered in Winter 2026. This iteration of ECT focuses on the concept of “structure,” starting briefly with its long history in philosophy, linguistics, and anthropology, and focusing on 1960s work on structure in France—by thinkers such as Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Deleuze, Foucault, Kristeva, Derrida, and Althusser. The seminar considers how a diverse and hard to categorize thought of structure became the “structuralism” that was then supplanted by “poststructuralist theory.”
About the Talk
Derrida’s critique of Claujde Lévi-Strauss in “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” is often seen as the decisive moment in a shift from structuralism to post-structuralism. A closer reading of Derrida’s argument here reveals a more complex relation between these two major movements in French thought and in critical theory generally.
Assigned Reading for the Talk:
- Jacques Derrida, “La Structure, le signe, et le jeu dans le discours des sciences humaines,” in L’Ecriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967) OR the English translation by Alan Bass: “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).
- And in Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (Routledge,1975) the chapters “Beyond Structuralism”, “Structuralism and the Qualities of Literature,” the conclusion.
About the Speaker
Jonathan Culler (BA. Harvard; B.Phil and D.Phil, Oxon) was Fellow in French at Selwyn College, Cambridge, then University Lecturer and Fellow in French at Brasenose College, Oxford, before moving to Cornell University in 1977, where he was Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature until his retirement in 2020. He is the author of Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty (1974) and numerous books on contemporary critical theory, French and English, including Structuralist Poetics (1975), On Deconstruction (1983), The Literary in Theory (2006), and Theory of the Lyric (2015). He has served as Secretary of the American Council of Learned Societies, President of the American Comparative Literature Association, and Chair of the New York Council for the Humanities. and he has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the British Academy.