1. The document reviews Jonathan Culler's book "Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction" which provides a concise overview of key concepts and approaches in literary theory. 2. Literary theory examines the concept of "literariness" and how theories of representation relate to theories of reality. It has applications across various academic and professional fields. 3. Culler outlines the major areas, topics, and themes that constitute different approaches to literary theory in an accessible way for readers new to the subject. He examines concepts like structural linguistics, narrative theory, speech-act theory, deconstruction, and theories of subjectivity.

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BOOK REVIEW
Jonathan Culler (1997). Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford
University Press), pp. 145.
Literary theory is not the theory of literature; it is actually the theory of ‘literariness.’
So, in that sense, literary theory is not reducible to the study of literary texts. This
very short introduction to literary theory by a leading authority on the area will be of
interest not only to students of literature, but also to those in professional schools.
That is because in addition to the study of literariness, literary theory is also about
the theories of representation. Broadly put, literary theory is about the relationship
between theories of reality and theories of representation. That is why this short
introduction will be as useful for businessmen and lawyers as it will be for literary
critics. It is also important to note at the outset that literary theory is the most
successful product to have ever been exported from departments of English, French,
and comparative literature. It not only hit the academic book shelves with a bang,
but also redefined what we mean by the humanities and social sciences. The task
that Jonathan Culler takes up in this book is to explain what literary theory is and
why it became as successful as it has in recent years.
It is also important to remember that literary theory is not a discipline like
philosophy. It is not well defined into sub-areas like metaphysics, ontology,
epistemology, and ethics. It is, in other words, a discourse that is still open to
appropriation by a range of academic and professional disciplines. In fact, the
question of whether literary theory will ever become a discipline is itself an
important question in literary theory. The scope of literary theory then is constantly
being redefined by those who attempt to write on the area. Jonathan Culler’s task in
this book is to set out the areas, topics, and themes that constitute the main
approaches to literary theory. He does this within the space of eight self-contained
chapters. The chapters are written in a way that will make it possible for even first
time readers to decide which of these areas is of interest to them and read up further
if required. These chapters are followed by an appendix which explains the different
schools and movements that have animated the history of literary theory. This
modular approach makes it probably the most user-friendly book that I have
encountered in this area of study.
The main areas of concern include the need to define literary theory and why the
difficulties theorists experience in defining theory tells us a lot about the structure
and function of theory. It is interesting to note that not all the work that is defined as
theory has been done by literary theorists themselves. On the contrary, what is
defined as ‘theory’ is a collection of texts represented by those belonging to literary
criticism, history, linguistics, narrative theory, poetics, psychoanalysis, rhetoric,

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sociology, and semiotics. What all these approaches have in common however is that
they explicate, problematize, relate, and intervene in the give-and-take between the
received notions of reality and representation in the history of ideas. Culler also
relates literary theory to areas like critical and cultural theory since they define
themselves vis-à-vis each other. The attempt to make sense of what we mean by a
theory of ‘language, interpretation, and meaning’ then is not reducible to literary
studies; they constitute instead the basic tools that we have to make sense of a world
saturated by literary and popular representations. The main wager here is that
common sense approaches do not constitute or explain reality; what we need to do is
to supplement these approaches with the notion of historical construction. This
means that we cannot take the basic assumptions and premises of language and
representation for granted. Literary theory then represents an attempt to rethink
these fundamental questions; that is why it is interdisciplinary, analytical,
speculative, and reflexive.
Does this mean that literature has ceased to matter? Does it mean that literary theory
will find its material elsewhere? It is obvious that literature and the literary canon
have not disappeared. However what we mean by literature and literary studies is
not the same anymore. That is, literature is not reducible to what is conventionally
thought to be creative or imaginative. Instead, we find that there are additional
criteria that we have to invoke like the aesthetic, ideology, literariness, inter-
textuality, and self-reflexivity. These, needless to say, are only representative criteria.
But, irrespective of exactly what the criteria are, what is really at stake is the fact that
it is possible to rethink the criteria in a way that was not possible before. A great deal
of literary criticism that is informed by theory is an attempt to ask if a text should
always be read by the conventional criteria or whether it is within the scope of
literary criticism to rethink the criteria if it is able to justify doing so. In other words,
literary texts are not static entities. They take the shape that they do in response to
the demands of a particular approach to literary criticism. It therefore does not make
sense to demand ‘immediate intelligibility’ of a literary text. Instead the reader must
learn to live with a literary text until it is able to yield the forms of meaning that
would justify the effort put into reading it with the aid of theory.
Culler reminds us that literary studies are increasingly turning to the interpretation
of cultural texts. This has led to the realization that the fabric of everyday reality is
imbued with forms of textual representation that used to constitute literary
interpretation. Approaches to the study of culture are informed by developments in
semiotics and structural anthropology. Culler analyses the different forms in which
cultural studies took shape; he contrasts the approaches associated with Roland
Barthes in France with those of Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart in Britain.
Cultural studies can also be understood as an attempt to deconstruct the opposition

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between high culture and low culture and study texts of both categories with a high
level of seriousness. It approximates to an inner tension within literary studies itself
between classical and romantic approaches to questions of literary representation.
The difference though is this: The romantics tried to incorporate the language,
themes, and concerns of the common folk into literature. That is, they understood
that the revitalization of high culture requires periodic inputs of low culture along
with aesthetic or literary manifestos to justify the incorporation. However, with the
cultural theorists, there is no need to incorporate low culture into high culture.
Instead, low culture is studied in tandem with high culture. This addresses the
nostalgia of the romantics to find something authentic in the language of the
common people. The relationship between mass culture, mass media, and popular
culture is also of importance in this regard. And, finally, Culler asks whether the
literary canon has become less or more important? Does the success of cultural
studies imply the end of literary studies? These are difficult questions to answer. It
appears that the answer is both yes and no.
The most important spur to literary theory has undoubtedly been the structural
linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure. Culler not only explains the basics of structural
linguistics, but also situates how and why it managed to provide the platform on
which literary theory was to make its appearance and impact in literary studies. This
is probably the most important chapter in this book, since all the theoretical
positions in literary study are related to the conflict between the differential and
referential functions of language. As somebody who has written previously on
structuralist poetics, Culler is on strong ground here. Just as literary theory is about
literariness; likewise, poetics is not reducible to the study of poetry, but about how
poetic effects are constructed in language. Structuralism is also a way of clarifying
the theory of genres in literary criticism. It helped literary critics to make explicit the
assumptions on which they went about identifying a text as belonging to a particular
genre. Culler analyses a number of lines from modernist poetry to identify the
generic conditions which constitute their literariness. The relationship between
theories of genre and literary ontology is too complex to be delineated here, but will
be worth the reader’s while to follow up both in this book and in Culler’s work as a
whole.
Jonathan Culler also summarizes for his readers what is at stake in theories of
narrative. For beginners, even basic analytic distinctions like story and plot in terms
of the causal structure of a literary narrative can be revelatory. The theoretical
implications of such analytic distinctions have not only been thought through in
literary criticism, but also in areas like history and psychoanalysis. What is really
exciting about narrative theory is that it promises us a better understanding of a
theory of human action. That is an instance then of how theoretical work in

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structuralist poetics went from being specific to how we read a poem or a story to
providing us with the basic rudiments of a theory of human action. The main
challenge here is to find a way of identifying what constitutes cause and effect in the
social realm. Theoretical attempts to understand the shape of stories in terms of how
they begin and end are also relevant outside literary study. This relates to the
existential and theoretical problems of closure in areas like psychoanalysis, the
construction of historical narratives, and the construction of national and
transnational identities. Culler also identifies a number of additional variables like
forms of speech in narrative theory, forms of linguistic invocation, temporality,
focus, distance, point-of-view, and so on. These variables are not only important for
narrative theory, but also have implications for a theory of cognition. Another thing
that narrative theorists are fond of doing is to read literary texts for what they have
to teach us about the human mind, its ability to use language as a medium for
thought, and the ways in which language and thought shape each other. As literary
theorists are fond of saying, language and speech are not only used to represent
ideas, but also to get things done in the world. This is the world of performatives (as
opposed to constatives) in the speech-act theory of J. L. Austin and John Searle.
Culler not only does a concise exposition of speech-act theory but also helps his
reader to understand how Jacques Derrida and the deconstructionists were to think-
through the implications of the performative dimension in their reading of literary
and philosophical texts. For the deconstructionists, the theoretical opposition
between the constative and the performative dimensions of language serves as the
structural interdependence that constitutes every text. It is in vain that theorists
choose between these approaches to explain how language, representations, or texts
work. Attempts to repress any of these categories go in vain because the narrative
dynamics of textuality ensure that the repressed term always returns in a way that
reiterates Derrida’s pet theme of supplementarity. In conclusion, Culler sets out the
theories of the subject that literary theorists have built in recent years to make sense
of the self, human identity, and questions of identification. These categories are not
only necessary to make sense of literary texts, but also to identify the conditions of
possibility of ‘being’ itself. This notion of ‘being’ encompasses both being in the
empirical sense and in terms of literary representations. The implications of this for
studies in areas like race, gender, and sexuality should not be hard to imagine. These
then are some of the areas covered in this very short introduction to literary theory.
It is only in the spirit of things that this review should be a very short introduction to
the book and not an exhaustive summation of what Jonathan Culler is up to here.
SHIVA KUMAR SRINIVASAN