Jonathan Culler

Jonathan Culler (born 1944) is an American literary critic. He was Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. His published works are in the fields of structuralism, literary theory and literary criticism.

Background and career Culler attended Harvard for his undergraduate studies, where he received a Bachelor of Arts in history and literature in 1966. After receiving a Rhodes scholarship, he attended St. John's College, Oxford University, where he earned a B.Phil. (now M.Phil.) in comparative literature (1968) and a D.Phil in modern languages (1972). His thesis for the B.Phil., on phenomenology and literary criticism, recorded Culler's first experiences with structuralism. The thesis explored the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the criticism of the "Geneva School" using the ideas of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, and Ferdinand de Saussure. 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 (1975).

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. He has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2001–), the American Philosophical Society (2006–), and the British Academy (2020-). In 2025 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Paris VII, and in 2026 a lifetime achievement award from the international Society for the Study of Narrative. Currently, he is Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature, emeritus, at Cornell University.

In the years 1971–1974, he was married to the poet Veronica Forrest-Thomson. Culler is currently married to deconstructionist critic Professor Cynthia Chase.

Major works Culler's Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature won the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association of America in 1976 for an outstanding book of criticism.