The Program in Experimental Critical Theory presents

Structuralism to Poststructuralism: Derrida on Lévi-Strauss

A Talk with Jonathan Culler

Monday, January 26
3:00-4:30pm PST
Via Zoom

About the Talk

Derrida’s critique of Claude 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.

About the Speaker

Jonathan Culler (BA. Harvard; B.Phil and D.Phil, Oxford) came to Cornell in 1977 as Professor of English and Comparative Literature and in 1982 succeeded M.H. Abrams in the Class of 1916 Chair.  He is the author of Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty (1974) and numerous books on contemporary critical theory and literature, including Ferdinand de Saussure (1976), The Pursuit of Signs (1981), On Deconstruction (1983), Barthes (2002), The Literary in Theory (2006), and Theory of the Lyric (2015). His Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature (1975), which we will be reading selections from, won MLA’s Lowell Prize.  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.