Jonathan Culler

Jonathan Culler studied at Harvard University and St John's College. The recorded working language is English and French. Employment is recorded with Cornell University and Yale University. Distinctions recorded are Guggenheim Fellowship, Rhodes Scholarship, honorary doctor of Paris 8 University and James Russell Lowell Prize.

• Name — Jonathan Culler • Born — 1 October 1944 • Birthplace — Cleveland • Alma Mater — Harvard University St. John's College, Oxford • Workplaces — Selwyn College, Cambridge Brasenose College, Oxford Yale University Cornell University • Occupation — Professor, Author

Culler attended Harvard for his undergraduate studies, where he received a Bachelor of Arts in history and literature in 1966. After receiving a Rhodes scholarship, he attended St. John's College, Oxford University, where he earned a B.Phil. (now M.Phil.) in comparative literature (1968) and a D.Phil in modern languages (1972). His thesis for the B.Phil., on phenomenology and literary criticism, recorded Culler's first experiences with structuralism. The thesis explored the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the criticism of the "Geneva School" using the ideas of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, and Ferdinand de Saussure. Culler's "expanded, reorganized and rewritten" doctoral dissertation, "Structuralism: The Development of Linguistic Models and Their Application to Literary Studies," became an influential prize-winning book, Structuralist Poetics (1975). Culler was Fellow in French and Director of Studies in Modern Languages at Selwyn College, Cambridge University, from 1969 to 1974, and Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford and University Lecturer in French from 1974 to 1977. He was visiting professor of French and Comparative Literature at Yale University in 1975. He is a past president of the Semiotic Society of America (1988), the American Comparative Literature Association (1999–2001), Secretary of the American Council of Learned Societies (2013–17), and Chair of the New York Council for the Humanities (2016–17). He has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2001–), the American Philosophical Society (2006–), and the British Academy (2020-). In 2025 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Paris VII, and in 2026 a lifetime achievement award from the international Society for the Study of Narrative. Currently, he is Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature, emeritus, at Cornell University. He retired in 2019 after teaching for over fifty years. In the years 1971–1974, he was married to the poet Veronica Forrest-Thomson. Culler is currently married to deconstructionist critic Professor Cynthia Chase.

Culler's Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature won the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association of America in 1976 for an outstanding book of criticism. Structuralist Poetics was one of the first introductions to the French structuralist movement available in English. His 1982 book 'On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism' did much the same for subsequent developments in French philosophy and critical theory. Culler's contribution to the Very Short Introductions series, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, received praise for its innovative technique of organization. It has been translated into 26 languages, including Kurdish, Latvian, and Albanian. Instead of chapters on critical schools and their methods, the book's eight chapters address issues and problems of literary theory. In The Literary in Theory (2007) Culler discusses the notion of theory and literary history's role in the larger realm of literary and cultural theory. He defines theory as an interdisciplinary body of work including structuralist linguistics, anthropology, Marxism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and literary criticism. His Theory of the Lyric (2015) approaches the Western lyric tradition, from Sappho to Ashbery, exploring the major parameters of the genre and contesting two dominant models of the lyric: lyric as the intense expression of the author's affective experience, and lyric as the fictional representation of the speech act of a persona. Both these models, according to Culler, are extremely limiting and ignore the specifically poetic aspects of lyric poetry, such as rhythm and sound patterning.

The canonical record carries the following identifying particulars.