Michael Wood (literary scholar)


Michael Wood is professor emeritus of English at Princeton University. He is a literary and cultural critic, and an author of critical and scholarly books, and a writer of reviews, review articles, and columns.
Wood was director of the Gauss Seminars in Criticism at Princeton from 1995 to 2001, and chaired Princeton's English department from 1998 to 2004. He contributes to literary publications such as The New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, where he is also an editorial board member and writes a column, "At the Movies". Wood also teaches at Middlebury College's Bread Loaf School of English in Vermont during the summers.
Before Princeton, Wood taught at Columbia University's Department of English and Comparative Literature, lived briefly in Mexico City, and chaired the English department at the University of Exeter in Devon, England.
In addition to countless reviews, he also has written books on Nabokov, the trans-historical appeal of the oracle from the Greeks to the cinema, on the relations between contemporary fiction and storytelling, and on figures in the modern cultural pantheon including Luis Buñuel, Franz Kafka, Stendhal, Gabriel García Márquez, and W. B. Yeats. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a member of the British Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.

Early life and education

Michael George Wood was born in Lincoln, England. He obtained his BA in 1957 in French and German from St John's College, Cambridge, and his PhD in 1962, also from Cambridge, for a thesis titled The Dramatic Function of Symbol in Maeterlinck and Claudel.

Career

From 1964 to 1982 Wood taught at Columbia University, becoming Professor of English and Comparative Literature. He then took up the Professorship of English Literature at the University of Exeter. In 1995 he was appointed Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton University, a post he held until retiring in 2013.

Personal life

Wood lives in New Jersey with his wife, Elena Uribe, and has three children: Gaby Wood, the chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, Patrick Wood, CEO of Util, and Tony Wood, former editor at the New Left Review and author of Chechnya: The Case For Independence.

Selected works

  • Stendhal
  • America in the Movies
  • García Márquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude
  • The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the risks of fiction
  • Children of Silence: on contemporary fiction
  • Belle de Jour
  • The Road to Delphi: the Life and Afterlife of Oracles
  • Franz Kafka
  • Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation, editor with Sandra Bermann
  • Literature and the Taste of Knowledge
  • Yeats and Violence
  • Film: A very short introduction
  • Alfred Hitchcock: The Man Who Knew Too Much
  • ''On Empson''