| | 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. | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. Stephen Owen | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2006 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 402b | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1946 | | | | | | |
Stephen Owen is widely viewed as the most important scholar-critic of Chinese literature in the West. He is the James Bryant Conant University Professor and former Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, he was the first specialist in his field to be made a University Professor at Harvard. At a time when understanding China is a major priority for the United States, Dr. Owen has, in a long series of distinguished books and articles, opened the door for Westerners to a new understanding of Chinese literature and culture. Though his specialty is the T'ang Dynasty (618-906 A.D.), he has impressive mastery of the range of Chinese literature over its 2,500 years. His work has been informed by recent Western work in literary theory and by a comparatist perspective. He has paid attention in new ways to Chinese literary theory, for example in Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics. His work shows a remarkable combination of learning, literary sensitivity, and elegance of style, as in the admirable readings of Chinese poetry in Remembrances: The Experience of the Past in Classical Chinese Literature. His magisterial An Anthology of Chinese Literature is an amazing poetic and scholarly accomplishment; almost all of the translations are by Dr. Owen himself, and they bring the translation of Chinese poetry, stories, plays, and essays to a new level of lucidity and literary distinction. His translations and annotations show how Chinese poetry is a genuine tradition, for example in its subtle use, in later poems, of allusions to earlier poems. Though his books are written in English and primarily for Western readers, they have such general importance that many of them have been translated into Chinese and published in China. He has a working knowledge of Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French, German, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, and Turkish. Without a doubt Dr. Owen has brought Chinese literature within the domain of the comparative study of literature. | |
| 3 | Name: | Dr. Pauline Yu | | | Institution: | American Council of Learned Societies | | | Year Elected: | 2006 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 402b | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1949 | | | | | | |
Pauline Yu, Former President of the American Council of Learned Societies, is a former Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Dean of Humanities in the College of Letters and Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. She received her B.A. in history and literature from Harvard University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in comparative literature from Stanford University. Dr. Yu is the author or editor of five books and dozens of articles on classical Chinese poetry, literary theory, comparative poetics, and issues in the humanities and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, ACLS, and NEH. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, she is on the Board of Trustees of the National Humanities Center, the Board of Overseers of Harvard University, the Board of Directors of the Teagle Foundation and the Senate of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. In addition, she is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Asian Cultural Council, the Board of Governors of the Hong Kong-America Center, and the Board of Trustees of the American Academy in Berlin. Dr. Yu is also an Adjunct Senior Research Scholar and Visiting Professor in East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. She was awarded the MLA's William Riley Parker Prize in December 2007. | |
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