Episode 55: Jim Phelan & Jonathan Culler — Edith Wharton’s “Roman Fever”

In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Jonathan Culler discuss Edith Wharton’s “Roman Fever,” which was first published in Liberty Magazine in 1934, and then included in her 1936 collection, The World Over. Jonathan Culler is the class of 1916 Professor Emeritus at Cornell University. Culler has been one of the most distinguished and productive literary and critical theorists of his generation. Among his 11 single-authored books are: the 1975 volume, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature, which won the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize for the best book by an MLA member in that year; the 1982 volume, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism, which lucidly explicated the then still emerging movement called deconstruction; and the 1997 book, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, which has been translated into more than 25 languages. Throughout his career, Culler has conducted extended engagements with narrative, narrative theory, and lyric theory, and in 2015, he published Theory of the Lyric. Among Culler’s many recognitions are his elections to several distinguished scholarly groups, including: the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2001; the American Philosophical Society, 2006; and the British Academy, 2020. The International Society for the Study of Narrative has selected Culler as the winner of the Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award for 2026.