14 Facts About Jonathan Culler

Jonathan Culler was born on 1944 and is an American literary critic.

Jonathan Culler was Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University.

Jonathan Culler's published works are in the fields of structuralism, literary theory and literary criticism.

Jonathan 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.

Jonathan 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.

Jonathan Culler was Visiting Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Yale University in 1975.

Jonathan Culler is a past president of the Semiotic Society of America, the American Comparative Literature Association, Secretary of the American Council of Learned Societies, and Chair of the New York Council for the Humanities.

Jonathan Culler has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the British Academy.

Jonathan Culler retired in 2019 after teaching for over fifty years.

Jonathan Culler defines Theory as an interdisciplinary body of work including structuralist linguistics, anthropology, Marxism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and literary criticism.

In Structuralist Poetics Jonathan Culler warns against applying the technique of linguistics directly to literature.

Jonathan Culler proposes that we use literary critical theory not to try to understand a text but rather to investigate the activity of interpretation.

Jonathan Culler suggests there are two classes of readers, "the readers as field of experience for the critic " and the future readers who will benefit from the work the critic and previous readers have done.

Jonathan Culler's critics complain of his lack of distinction between literature and the institution of writing in general.