Robert Scholes

Robert E. Scholes (1929-2016) was an American literary critic and theorist. He is known for his ideas on fabulation and metafiction.

He graduated from Yale University. Since 1970, he has been a Professor at Brown University.

With Eric S. Rabkin, he published in 1977 the book Science Fiction: History, Science, Vision, which considerably influenced science fiction studies. In it, they attempt to explain the literary history of the genre, but also the sciences such as physics and astronomy.

Scholes became well known as a cogent guide to literary theory and semiotics as they became influential in U.S. literary studies in the 1970s and 1980s. His 1982 book Semiotics and Interpretation was praised in the Times Literary Supplement as offering "a clutch of examples of semiotics usefully and intelligently applied, which Scholes's patient, cheerful tone and his resolutely concrete vocabulary manage to combine into a breezily informative American confection."

Scholes holds honorary doctorates from Lumière University Lyon 2, France, (1987) and SUNY Purchase (2003). He is a past president of the Semiotic Society of America (1989–1990) and of the Modern Language Association of America (2004).

Scholes is currently the director of the Modernist Journals Project. In his collaboration with Clifford Wulfman, Modernism in the Magazines: An Introduction (2010), Scholes offers a primer on early twentieth-century magazines, with particular attention given to the relationship of advertising to editorial content.

...
Wikipedia