ABSTRACT
The most effective critique of Jakobson’s theory of poetry occurred in Jonathan Culler’s Structuralist Poetics (1975). Its effectiveness is due more to the timing of this publication than to its comprehensive validity. By the mid-1970s the literary studies faculties in Anglo-American higher education were undergoing what is often referred to as a crisis. Structuralism was half a century old and poststructuralism was already well established: what was required, both by students and by the majority of academics, were texts that provided reliable guides to these bizarre continental practices. Sadly, most readers’ encounters with ‘Jakobson’ are via Culler (and others) rather than through a direct reading of Jakobson’s own work. Jakobson himself, perhaps sensing Culler’s status as a trusted spokesman for the new paradigm, was displeased. Culler’s writings are ‘equally as pretentious as amateurish, demonstrate an inability to catch the essence of… the general structuration of a poem. Critics of Culler’s mold conceive their only task to be one of criticising and discarding any rudiments of analytic enquiry into poetic works, without undertaking any positive steps themselves’ (SW III, pp. 787–8).
