Jonathan Culler's "literary Competence" Discrimination

Literary Competence, a set of forms to reading, is central to Jonathan Culler's Structuralist Poetics. Linguitics, Structuralism, and Structuralist Poetics come down in a continuous line. Hence the analysis of literary competence must refer to the relations between them.Linguistics has established the theoretical foundation of literary competence for the enlightenment of the system of literary sign. First of all, because literary competence directs to the text, its final goal is the meaning of the text, so, signifier and signified of the text, namely the expression and the meaning of the text should firstly be defined. The expression of the text is equivalent to the language layer, the meaning of the text is equivalent to language features layer and significance layer. The meaning of the text, incompletely, is always in the procession. And, the form of literary competence is exactly the conventional relations between signifier and signified. Secondly, because study on text system is synchronic, so study on literary competence is synchronic too, and is in certain literary states.On the other hand, the contribution of linguistics has been deriving out the concept of literary competence directly. Distinguishing langue and parole, Saussure took langue as a system and took parole as the embodiment of the system, from which Chomsky developed out such corresponding relations: langue-rule-competence, parole- behavior-performance. Literary competence was developed by linguistic competence directly.Structuralist poetics has formed the theoretical background of literary competence. As a branch of rhetoric in broad sense, poetics studies activities of literary language. Drawing lessons from methods of structuralism, Culler created structuralist poetics, which didn't care about what the meaning of the text was, but paid close attention to the fact how the meaning of the text was produced. It led to the production of literary competence. Meanwhile, structuralism's views on structure make literary competence a kind of structural competence, which structures the text then get meaning from it.The result of literary competence is not only explaining the course of meaning production, but also rebuilding the four elements of literature: universe, artist, work, audience. Literary competence reflects both in readers' reading and artist's writing. It is the consistency of both sides' literary competence that makes the exchange between artist and audience become possible. And the media of exchange is the intertextuality space including both universe and work.In a word, the three parts of this thesis attempts to answer following questions respectively: a. Where does the concept of literary competence derive from? What is the comprehension of text? b. How about the position of literary competence in Structuralist Poetics? How did it work? c. What is the influence of literary competence on the four elements of literature?...