1981: Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction
While semiotics and structuralism started out as best buds, Culler suggests that, forget these two, it’s deconstruction that can be useful in showing how language and representation are always coming undone. As an example, Culler points to M.H. Abrams’ 1953 book The Mirror and the Lamp (a classic text on Romantic literary theory): while Abrams writes that the Romantics abandoned mimesis (i.e. mirroring) for self-expression, Culler argues that Abrams ends up suggesting the opposite—that they never got rid of mirror images.
Culler also deconstructs the apostrophe—no, not the punctuation mark, but a poetic device in which a speaker addresses things or people who aren’t actually there. What Culler argues here is that speakers who address nature (e.g. the clouds) or spirits present themselves as visionaries, when really, they’re just being artsy-fartsy. That critics have mostly avoided discussing the apostrophe is, for Culler, because poetry might lose some of its street cred if we flagged up this sort of thing.
Discussing the apostrophe, Culler notes that using a term of address (“ye birds,” for example) brings the addressee into the present even if they’re really from the past. When poetry makes use of the apostrophe, then, what effect does this have on narrative, and of our understanding of what’s going on?
In his deconstruction of The Mirror and the Lamp, Culler points out that “a mirror is no use without light, and there is no point in illuminating a scene unless something will register or reflect what is there.” So what can shed light on things in an analytically meaningful way? And is it inevitable that all contrasts collapse under deconstructive analysis?