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Speaker(s): Jonathan Culler

Jonathan Culler is the Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. He is the author of numerous books on literary theory and criticism, including Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature and On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism , which established his reputation as a lucid analyst and expositor of complex ideas. In addition to a book on Flaubert and brief introductions to Ferdinand de Saussure and to Roland Barthes, Culler has published three collections of essays, most recently The Literary in Theory. His Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction has been translated into some 20 languages, including Tamil, Latvian, Kurdish, and Macedonian, and was reissued in an expanded edition in 2011. Culler has been President of the American Comparative Literature Association and has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society.

“Theory of the Lyric ” undertakes to lay the groundwork for a more capacious and pertinent theory of the lyric than either the romantic model of intense self-expression or the modern model of the fictive speech act by a persona. Briefly exploring a series of the most canonical lyrics from different eras and languages, from Sappho to Ashbery, it attempts to identify the most salient features of lyric so as to establish the parameters for theory that might help bring out the variations in lyric over its long history in the West.