So now I'm reading Jonathan Culler's Structuralist Poetics (1975) and enjoying it very much. It's a great review of this post-structuralism and semiotics course I "sat in on" while "hanging out" in Australia longer than I had initially planned. Semiotics doesn't do it for me in itself, but I enjoy it very much as a major facet in the history of twentieth-century thought. The first thing that impressed me was that Culler (an American Rhodes scholar now teaching at Cornell) says something to the effect of: "We Anglophone critics need to start reading the French!!!" He's also influenced by Roland Barthes, one of my very favorite philosophers. He also draws from Noam Chomsky and C. S. Peirce (pronounced "Purse").
I've only finished the first chapter ("The Linguistic Foundation"), and it occurred to me that I've never understood the structuralist problematization of the binary opposition until now. Here's what Culler says:
"[W]hen two things are set in opposition to one another the reader is forced to explore qualitative similarities and differences, to make a connection so as to derive meaning from the disjunction. But the very flexibility and power of binarism depends on the fact that what it organizes are qualitative distinctions, and if those distinctions are irrelevant to the matter in hand, then binary oppositions can be very misleading, precisely because they present factitious organization."
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