Jonathan Culler

Sound and Rhythm in Contemporary American Poetry

Although much poetry of the past 50 years has largely abandoned attempts to achieve verbal intensity through rhyme, rhythmic effects and the play of sound generally, there is still much to celebrate for those of us who value poetry for the ways it differ from prose.  Focusing first on the persistence of fixed forms and then on the effectiveness of sporadic as opposed to systematic rhyme, I turn at the end to the exciting practice of two twenty-first century poets, Terrance Hayes and Harryette Mullen.

Jonathan Culler is Class of 1916 Professor Emeritus at Cornell University.

Jonathan Culler served as Professor of English and Comparative Literature and in 1982 succeeded M.H. Abrams in the Class of 1916 Chair at Cornell University.

His Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature, won MLA’s Lowell Prize and established his reputation as analyst and expositor of critical theory. Now known especially for On Deconstruction: Literature and Theory After Structuralism, and Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (which has been translated into some 27 languages), he published Theory of the Lyric (Harvard University Press) in the spring of 2015.

Professor Culler has been President of the American Comparative Literature Association, Secretary of the American Council of Learned Societies and Chair of the New York Council for the Humanities. At Cornell he has served as chair of the departments of English, Comparative Literature, and Romance Studies, as well as Senior Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001 and to the American Philosophical Society in 2006 and the British Academy in 2020.