Jonathan Culler

Jonathan Dwight Culler (* 1944 ) is an American English scholar , Romance scholar , comparativeist and literary theorist who has attracted international attention primarily through his work on structuralism and post-structuralist deconstruction .

biography

Culler studied comparative literature at Harvard University and the University of Oxford . From 1969 to 1974 he taught Modern Languages at the University of Cambridge . He was then appointed as a Fellow at Brasenose College in Oxford and worked at French universities. In 1975 he was visiting professor at Yale University . In 1988 he was President of the Semiotic Society of America . He is currently the Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University .

In 2001, Culler was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . He has been a member of the American Philosophical Society since 2006 .

Important publications

Culler's Oxford dissertation was published in 1975 under the title Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature . It is considered to be decisive for the establishment of structuralism in Anglophone literary studies and was awarded the James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association .

His publications on Jacques Derrida's method of deconstruction (especially On Deconstruction , 1982), in their effort to systematically grasp Derrida's thinking, contributed to freeing Derrida's reputation for pseudophilosophy , which he had at least partially possessed among American academics. On the deconstructive side, however, objections were raised against the facts presented in a shortened or overly harmonizing way.

Culler became known to a wider audience through his literary theory: A Brief Introduction (1997), which stands out from the field of textbooks in that it is mainly not classified according to schools and schools of thought, but is divided into the most important subject areas.

Publications (selection)

• Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1975. New edition London: Routledge and Kegan Paul (Routledge Classics) 2002.
• The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1981.
• On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1982; German deconstruction. Derrida and the post-structuralist literary theory. Reinbek near Hamburg: Rowohlt 1999, ISBN 978-3-499-55635-7 .
• Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1997; German literary theory. A brief introduction. (Reclam Universal Library 18166) Stuttgart 2002, ISBN 3-15-018166-6 .
• The Literary in Theory: Cultural Memory in the Present. Stanford: Stanford UP 2006, ISBN 978-0-8047-5374-6 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Jonathan Culler in the catalog of the German National Library
• Page at Cornell University

Individual evidence

1. ^ Member History: Jonathan Culler. American Philosophical Society, accessed July 2, 2018 (with a short biography).