Jonathan Culler (1944 - ) is an important figure of the structuralism movement.

Background

Culler attended Harvard for his undergraduate studies, where he received a Bachelor of Arts in history and literature in 1966. He then received a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. There he attended St. John's College earning a B. Phil in comparative literature (1968) and a Ph.D. in modern languages (1972). His thesis for the B. Phil. recorded Culler's first experiences with structuralism. The thesis explored the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty using the ideas of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, and Ferdinand de Saussure. Currently, he is Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. Culler is married to respected deconstructionist critic Cynthia Chase, half-sister to comedian and actor Chevy Chase.

Bibliography

• Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty
• Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature
• Ferdinand de Saussure
• The Pursuit of Signs
• On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism
• Roland Barthes
• The Call of the Phoneme: Puns and the Foundations of Letters
• Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Instituitions
• Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction
• Barthes: A Very Short Introduction

1944 births | Living people