A Conversation with Jonathan Culler

Abstract

During his 38 years on the Cornell faculty, Jonathan Culler (successor to M. H. Abrams as Class of 1916 Professor of English) has served as academic administrator as well as teacher and scholar, first as Director of the Society for the Humanities and subsequently as Chair of the English Department, Chair of the Comparative Literature Department, and Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. His undergraduate teaching has included Freshman Humanities seminars, as well as large lecture courses treating literary texts as more than self-reflective explorations of the act of creating novels and poems. Much of his teaching at all levels has involved his scholarly interest in critical theory, which he has pursued since his pre-Cornell days at Cambridge and Oxford, where he also engaged in a form of academic administration quite different from what he has found at Cornell and other American universities.