| 1 | Name: | Dr. Jonathan Culler | |
| Institution: | Cornell University | ||
| Year Elected: | 2006 | ||
| Class: | 4. Humanities | ||
| Subdivision: | 402b | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1944 | ||
Jonathan Culler is Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. He received his D. Phil. from St. John's College, Oxford University in 1972 and served on the faculties of Cambridge and Oxford Universities prior to joining the Cornell University faculty in 1977. Dr. Culler also directed Cornell's Society for Humanities for ten years and served as senior associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences from 2000-03. An expert on French literature, Jonathan Culler is the author of the classic Flaubert study The Uses of Uncertainty (1974). His most visible contribution, however, has been the interpretation to the English-speaking world of the French critical tradition of structuralism from de Saussure to Derrida. Where others have lost themselves, and their readers, in a thicket of obfuscations and misunderstood concepts, Dr. Culler has maintained an exemplary clarity. His writing has the limpid elegance of a Mozart piano sonata. He has probably done more than anyone else in the United States to keep comparative literature and literary criticism both accessible to new ideas and readable to wider audiences. Jonathan Culler lives and works in France, England, and the United States. His other published works include Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature (1975); Ferdinand de Saussure (1976); The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction; (1981); On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (1982); Roland Barthes (1983); Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions (1988); Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (1997); and The Literary in Theory (2007). Cornell University Press issued the 25th anniversary edition of On Deconstruction in 2008. Dr. Culler is the recipient of a Rhodes Scholarship (1966-69) and the James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association of America (1975). He was appointed as a member of the board of directors of the New York State Council for the Humanities in 2007. He was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2001, the American Philosophical Society in 2006, and the British Academy in 2020. | |||