Culler Chapter 4: Language, Meaning, and Interpretation

At the beginning of this chapter, Culler argues, “[t]here are at least three different dimensions or levels of meaning: the meaning of a word, of an utterance, and of a text” (57). To describe the meaning of words, Culler looks to de Saussure’s definition of language as a system of differences (57-9), then to two theories of how language and thought relate: one that posits that language articulates pre-existing notions; the other, that language defines what we can think. He uses this foundation to describe the meaning of utterances, returning to de Saussure’s distinction of parole (speech) from langue (language) before invoking Chomsky’s concept of “linguistic competence”: that there is no essential meaning, but only speakers’ ability to distinguish difference in language (60-1).

These definitions set the stage for Culler’s discussion of the meaning of texts. He places discussions of linguistic difference, informed by de Saussure and Chomsky and within the field of poetics, squarely in opposition to discussions of essential textual meaning, which lies within hermeneutics (61-3). Culler argues, “the modern tradition of criticism has overwhelmingly” favored hermeneutics, “making the interpretation of individual works the payoff of literary study” (62). Culler briefly excepts from this trend reader-response theory, which looks to speakers (i.e. readers) in the Chomskyan tradition (63-4), before describing the contemporary “game” “in which texts are mapped into a target language” (65). Though Culler argues that “[y]ou can’t make a work mean just anything[;] it resists” (66), he does note that contemporary criticism is either a hermeneutics “which takes the text, in its functioning, to have something valuable to say” or a “symptomatic” hermeneutics “which treats the text as the symptom of something non-textual, something supposedly ‘deeper’, which is the real source of interest” (69).

Though Culler certainly favors poetic over hermeneutic criticism in this chapter (as might be expected from the author of the seminal Structuralist Poetics), his leaning might be a useful corrective. The Structuralist obsession with closed systems (manifest in New Critical close reading) led critics to neglect context throughout much of the 20^th century; however, we seem still to be in an over-corrective moment in which much criticism “neglects the specificity of the object” (69). Perhaps greater attention to idea that the text might “have something valuable to say” would be productive.