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doc. Erik Sherman Roraback, D.Phil. (Oxon.)

HISTORICAL-INTELLECTUAL BACKGROUND & CREDENTIALS AS A TEACHER-SCHOLAR (AN ENSEIGNEUR)

Nationality: United States of America
E-mail: erik.roraback@gmail.com
Birthplace: Seattle, Washington, USA

“[The great philosophies] are towering mountains, unclimbed and unclimbable. But they endow the land with what is highest and show its primeval bedrock. They stand as the aiming point and forever form the sphere of sight; they bear transparency and concealment. When are such mountains really what they are? Certainly not when we have supposedly climbed and conquered them. Rather, only when they truly persevere for us and for the land. But how few are capable of this, of letting the most lively soaring emerge in the stillness of the mountain range and of remaining in the sphere of this soaring-over? This alone is what thinking’s genuine setting-into-perspective must strive for.” (trans. Enowning, 131)
—Martin Heidegger (1889–1976)

RESEARCH, TEACHING, INTELLECTUAL INTERESTS AND COMPETENCIES:

History of U.S. Literature, especially Henry James and Thomas Pynchon; Niccolò Machiavelli, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Milton, John Keats, Honoré de Balzac, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, James Joyce of Finnegans Wake; the Bible as Imaginative Literature; world literature in translation including Homer, Virgil, Dante Alighieri, Cervantes, and Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Occidental thought and culture, especially Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, the Jena Romantics with special reference to F.W. Schlegel and Novalis, Schelling Hegel, Nietzsche, Bergson, Freud, Benjamin, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, the Frankfurt School with special attention to Adorno, Artaud, Arendt, Bataille, Blanchot, Barthes, Debord, Lacan, Foucault, Lévinas, Derrida particularly Glas, Deleuze, de Certeau, Luhmann, Leo Bersani, Said, Baudrillard, Étienne Balibar, Althusser, Michel Serres, Jacques Rancière, Lacoue-Labarthe, Fredric Jameson, Jean-Luc Nancy, Alain Badiou, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler, Peter Sloterdijk, Slavoj Žižek, Gianni Vattimo, Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Bernard Stiegler, Frédéric Lordon, Nicolas Bourriaud, culture and big finance, culture and imperialism, culture and quantum theory, baroque and neobaroque studies, community and experimental creativity / decreativity studies, theoretical psychoanalysis.

Cinema and Cinema Theory, especially Deleuze, Jameson, Žižek, and international movies (e.g., Akerman, Keaton, Dreyer, Murnau, Lang, Eisenstein, Welles, Ozu, Bresson, Tarkovsky, Antonioni, Fellini, Fassbinder, Terrence Malick, Resnais, Kurosawa, and Deren); new media studies and philosophy including US television (Sons of Anarchy, The Expanse, The Rockford Files, Twin Peaks, etc.).

Mass and popular culture, and cultural-studies, including American baseball (e.g., Cobb, Ruth, Walter Johnson, Mathewson, Paige, Aaron, Mays, Williams, Mantle, Koufax), American basketball (e.g., Bill Russell, Oscar Robertson, Magic Johnson), and world tennis (e.g. Rod Laver, Björn Borg, Jimmy Connors, John McEnroe, Ivan Lendl, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, and Roger Federer), classical music (e.g., Hildegard von Bingen, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner, Mahler, and Satie), and jazz music (e.g, Baker, Coleman, Coltrane, Holiday); history of art.

ACADEMIC APPOINTMENTS:

(V) Affiliate Associate Professor formerly Visiting Scholar, English Department, University of Washington-Seattle, for comparative cultural research (invited by dr. Robert McNamara, prof. Brian M. Reed, Chair) officially 15 June–30 September, 2015 and invited again from dr. McNamara and prof. Reed for 1 June–30 September 2016. This Visiting Scholar status with library privileges (including online access) was extended to 30 September 2017 and again for: 1 January–31 December 2018 and from prof. Anis Bawarshi, Acting Chair, 1 January–15 September 2019. The English Department faculty voted in a quorum in May 2019 to change my status to Affiliate Associate Professor, which is a higher rank. This new status has now been approved by the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences as effective from 16 September 2019.

(IV) University of Winchester, Winchester, United Kingdom, University Visiting Research Fellowship, December 2014–December 2019 and Three-Year Renewal, University Visiting Research Fellowship, University of Winchester, 10/2020–10/2023. One predecessor is the British literary scholar of medieval literature, Tom Shippey (Ph.D. Cantab.).

(III) Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic, Director, American Literature and Cultural-Studies, 1 September 2014–present.

Successful habilitation proceedings were held at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, 19 iv 2018 with a lecture entitled, “The Stars of a Constellation; or, Orson Welles-William Shakespeare, Movement, and Silence”. The academic council approved of my promotion to the degree of docent and to the associate professorship. Official notification from the Rector’s Office of Charles University dates the appointment to Docent and to Associate Professor of American and English Literature from 1 July 2018.

General Researcher-Scholar Status changed from 1 January 2015. 6 hours weekly teaching. Research points needed increased by 100% for this position after two highly productive 5 year performances in comparative cultural research from 2004–2009 and from 2009–2014.

Faculty member: U.S. Literature, Cinema Studies and Critical Theory, 10/97–present.

Interim Director of American Literature and Studies

(while doc. Justin Quinn was on leave)

—Summer 2011.

MA-level basic (i.e., required) and optional classes taught and forthcoming (52/95 w/FAMU included):

  1. ‘Theoretical Approaches to Henry James’, Winter 1997.
  2. ‘Theoretical Approaches to Joyce’s Finnegans Wake‘, Summer 1998.
  3. ‘Intercultural Authority: Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow‘, Winter 1998.
  4. ‘Artistic Authority: Joyce’s Ulysses’, Winter 1998.
  5. ‘Cinematic Authority: Orson Welles and Alain Resnais’, Summer 1999.
  6. ‘Aesthetic Pleasure and Authority: Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon‘, Winter 1999.
  7. ‘Cinematic Pleasure and Authority: From Griffith to Wenders’, Winter 1999.
  8. ‘Desire and Power: Late Novels of James’, Summer 2000.
  9. ‘Aesthetic Pleasure and Authority: Joyce’s Finnegans Wakeand Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow‘, Summer 2000.
  10. ‘Cinematic Pleasure and Evil: From Welles to Akerman’, Winter 2000.
  11. ‘Aesthetic Pleasure and Evil: Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow‘, Winter 2000.
  12. ‘Cinematic Unthought: Orson Welles’, Summer 2001. The seminar took place at Ponrepo, an independent cinema in Prague; the post-film discussions were also open to the general public.
  13. ‘Explosions of Freedom: James, Bataille, Deleuze, Nancy’, Summer 2001.
  14. ‘Cinematic Meaning and Pleasure’, Winter 2001.
  15. ‘Explosions of Being’, Winter 2001.
  16. ‘Literary and Philosophical Baroque’, Summer2002.
  17. ‘Cinematographic Meanings and Pleasures’, Summer 2002.
  18. ‘Cultural Baroque: Heidegger, Joyce, Klossowski’, Winter 2002.
  19. ‘Cinema as Meaning and Pleasure’, Winter 2002.
  20. ‘Cinema as Meaning and Enjoyment’, Summer 2003.
  21. ‘Literary and Philosophical Baroque: Spinoza and Leibniz for the 21st Century’, Summer 2003.
  22. ‘Leibniz and Contemporary Culture’, Summer 2003.
  23. ‘Spinoza and Contemporary Culture’, Winter 2003.
  24. ‘Aesthetic Joys: Joyce’s Finnegans Wake‘, Summer 2004.
  25. ‘Forms of Culture: Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow‘, Winter 2005.
  26. ‘Transforming Tradition: Baroque Ventures, Identities and Values in Literature and Theory I’, Winter 2005.
  27. ‘Transforming Tradition: Baroque Ventures, Identities and Values in Literature and Theory II’, Summer 2006.
  28. ‘Modernity & Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow‘, Winter 2007.
  29. ‘Shakespeare, Orson Welles, & Modernity‘, Winter 2007.
  30. ‘Modernity & Pynchon’s Against the Day (2006)’, Summer 2008.
  31. ‘Cosmic Energies & Pynchon’s Against the Day‘ Winter 2008.
  32. ‘Cosmic Energies, Orson Welles, & Shakespeare’, Winter 2008.
  33. ‘The Philosophical Baroque: Joyce’s Finnegans Wake & Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow‘, Summer 2009.
  34. ‘Social Theory, Pynchon’s Inherent Vice (2009) & the Philosophical Baroque’, Winter 2009.
  35. ‘Experience, Commodity Culture, & Spectacle Society: From James to Stein’, Winter 2009.
  36. ‘Lacan’s Seminars & After’, Winter 2010.
  37. ‘Experience, Commodity Culture, & Spectiacle Society: U.S. Fiction & Critical Theory’, Winter 2011.
  38. ‘Psychoanalysis & Cultural-Studies’, Summer 2011.
  39. ‘Psychoanalysis & Cultural-Studies’, Winter 2012.
  40. ‘Experience, Commodity Culture, & Spectacle Society: U.S. Fiction & Cultural-Studies’, Summer 2013.
  41. ‘Experience, Commodity Culture, & Spectacle Society: U.S. Fiction & Cultural-Studies, Winter 2014.
  42. ‘Psychoanalysis & Cultural-Studies’, Summer 2015.
  43. ‘Experience, Commodity Culture and Spectacle Society: U.S. Fiction and Cultural-Studies’, Summer 2016.
  44. ‘Experience, Commodity Culture and Spectacle Society: U.S. Fiction and Cultural-Studies’, Summer 2017.
  45. ‘Experience, Commodity Culture and Spectacle Society: U.S. Fiction and Cultural-Studies’, Summer 2018.
  46. ‘Experience, Commodity Culture and Spectacle Society: U.S. Fiction and Cultural-Studies’, Summer 2019.
  47. ‘Experience, Commodity Culture and Spectacle Society: U.S. Fiction and Cultural-Studies’, Summer 2020.
  48. ‘Circulating within the Postmodern Cinematic Image‘, Summer 2020.
  49. ‘Experience, Commodity Culture, and Spectacle Society: US Fiction and Cultural-Studies’, Summer 2021.
  50. ‘Experience, Commodity Culture, and Spectacle Society: US Fiction and Cultural-Studies’, Summer 2022.
  51. ‘Experience, Commodity Culture, and Spectacle Society: US Fiction and Cultural-Studies’, Summer 2024.
  52. ‘Experience, Commodity Culture, and Spectacle Society: US Fiction and Cultural-Studies’, Summer 2025.

BA-level required classes taught (81) and forthcoming (1) + Special lectures:

  1. Lectures given on Twentieth–Century American Prose fiction,  Summer 2000–Winter 2017 (selected semesters); 3 lectures, e.g., Winter 14–Winter 24).
  2. ‘US literature I, beginnings–1870: 2003, 2010 (3 sections taught).
  3. ‘US literature II, 1870–1945’: 1997–2005; 2007–Summer 24 (30 sections taught).
  4. ‘US literature III, 1945–present’: 1998–2002, 2004–Winter 24 (48 sections taught and 1 forthcoming).

Special lecture and seminar for an M.A. level department lecture series taught (one of three for American cultural studies):

I. ‘Consumerism & the Unconscious in U.S. Prose Fiction & in Continental Theory’, Winter 2013, Winter 2014, Winter 2015, Winter 2016, Winter 2017, Winter 2018, and Winter 2019.

Special lecture and seminar for an M.A. level American Cultural Studies lecture series:

  1. Two special lectures for an American Cultural Studies lecture series, ‘A Pairing of Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet and of James’s Washington Square’; ‘Money, Bio-Power and ‘Race’: James’s The American Scene’, Winter semester 1999.
  2. ‘Money, Power and Desire of James’s The Golden Bowl’, Winter 2000.
  3. ‘Thomas Pynchon and the Post-Enlightenment Epoch’, Summer 2002.
  4. ‘Orson Welles, American Cinema and the Unthought’, Summer 2003.
  5. ‘New Halls of Communication: Maurice Blanchot and Thomas Pynchon’, Summer 2004.
  6. ‘New Subjects and Modes of Movement: Cinematic Narratives of Terrence Malick’, Summer 2005.
  7. ‘Orson Welles, Shakespeare and American Culture with Special Reference to Chimes at Midnight’, Summer 2006.
  8. ‘The Concept of Dizziness and the Cinema of Buster Keaton’, Summer 2007.
  9. ‘Adorno, Baroque Modernity, & U.S. Culture’, Summer 2008.
  10. ‘Adorno, Dystopia-Utopia, U.S. Cultural Modernity, & After’, Summer 2009.
  11. ‘Adorno, Dystopia-Utopia, U.S. Cultural Modernity, & After’, Summer 2010.
  12. ‘Adorno, Dystopia-Utopia, U.S. Cultural Modernity, & After’, Summer 2011.
  13. ‘Adorno, Dystopia-Utopia, U.S. Cultural Modernity, & After’, Summer 2012.
  14. ‘Adorno, Dystopia-Utopia, U.S. Cultural Modernity, & After’, Summer 2013.

Supervisions: 

72+ (71 Charles/1 FAMU; 54 graduates, including 6 successfully finished doctoral students, 29 successfully completed master’s students and 1 MFA student at FAMU, and 18 successfully accomplished bachelor’s students; ongoing: 4 Ph.D. students e.g.,:

  1. Supervised an MA thesis (Silvia Hromádková) “Three Readings of Pynchon”. 1997–98. Graduated.
  2. Supervised a Vilém Mathesius Prize-winning MA thesis (Jana Mlčochová) “Freedom & Subjectivity: The Late Novels of Henry James”. 2001–02. Graduated.
  3. Supervised an MA thesis on (Karel Vachek)  on Thomas Pynchon. 2002–03. Graduated.
  4. Supervised an MA thesis (Vĕra Musilová) “The New Franklin: Demythologizing Benjamin Franklin’s Moralities”. 2002–03. Graduated.
  5. Supervised a Vilém Mathesius Prize-winning MA thesis (Hana Ondráčková, one of two translators of a published edition of Gravity’s Rainbow into Czech) “Radiant Literature, Thomas Pynchon: Gravity’s Rainbow”. 2003–05. Graduated.
  6. Supervised a B.A.-level thesis (Markéta Křenková) “Frustrated Sensibilities in the Context of the Conventions of the New York Elite of Wharton’s Fiction”. 2005–06. Graduated.
  7. Supervised a B.A.-level thesis (Pavlína Černá) “Authentic Existence and the ‘American Dream’ in Dreiser’s Fiction”.  2006–07. Graduated.
  8. Supervised an M.A.-level thesis (Lenka Petáková) on Henry James  2006 only. Unfinished.
  9. Supervised an M.A.-level thesis (Evgenia Konoreva) “Reflections of the Deleuzian ‘Time-Image’ in the Films of Andrei Tarkovsky and Alain Resnais”. 2007–08. Graduated.
  10. Supervised a Ph.D. thesis on Theoretical Otherness, on Local Color Fiction and on Kate Chopin by Dagmar Junková (M.A. in English and Philosophy, Charles Univ.), 2005–2009. Held a Fulbright Scholarship in the USA, and has now graduated. Successful viva held 30 June 2009. Graduated.
  11. Supervised a Ph.D. thesis on the Post-Modern Puzzle Novel by Richard Stock (M.A. in Literature and Theory, University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign), half-time 2003–10. Successful viva held 11 February 2010. One positive opponent’’s report from Prof. J. Hillis Miller, University of California-Irvine, USA. Graduated.
  12. Supervised a B.A.-level thesis (Vera Řenčová) on Edith Wharton. 2008–10. Program changed.
  13. Supervised a B.A.-level thesis (Daniel Litochleb) “Entropy and Consumerism in Pynchon’s Works”. 2008–11. Graduated.
  14. Supervised a B.A.-level thesis (Andrea Knotková) “The Archetype of the Indian in American Cinematography”. 2009–11. Graduated.
  15. Supervised a B.A.-level thesis (Julie Žáčková) “African-Americans in American Film”. 2009–11. Graduated.
  16. Supervised a Vilém Mathesius Prize-winning B.A.-level thesis (Marika Buršíková) “The Metaphysical Detective Story: Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy and Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, 2009–10. Graduated.
  17. Supervised an M.A.-level thesis (Michaela Létalová) “The Columbian World Exposition of 1893 and Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day“. 2008–10. Graduated.
  18. Supervised an M.A.-level thesis (Pavlína Černá) “Ethics of the self as an aesthetics of existence in Wharton’s The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence.”,  2008–10. Graduated. Currently a PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia, Canada.
  19. Supervised an M.A.-level thesis (Jana Kadrevis) Acker & Pynchon: A Comparative Analysis of the Postmodern Body. 2009–10. Unfinished.
  20. Supervised a Ph.D. thesis on “Against Adaptation: Toward Transdisciplinarity and Minor Cinema” by Linda Petříková (M.A. in English, Charles Univ.), 2006–14. Studied at NYU in New York City, USA on a competitive scholarship in a competition held at the Arts Faculty of Charles University. One positive opponent/reader’s report from prof. Richard Burt, University of Florida, USA. Graduated.
  21. Supervised a Ph.D. thesis on Narrative Space and Thomas Pynchon by Vít Vaníček (PhDr., Charles Univ.), 2005–12. Was studying in Indiana, USA on a competitive scholarship. Graduated. Now teaching Composition at the University of Illinois-Chicago. One positive opponent/reader’s report from prof. J. Hillis Miller, University of California-Irvine, USA. Graduated.
  22. Supervised a Ph.D. thesis on “‘Bartleby, the Scrivener in Contemporary Culture” by Tereza Stejskalová (M.A. in English and Philosophy, Charles Univ.),  Successful viva held 7 June 2017. Thesis readers: Prof. Marcel Arbeit, Palacký University, Olomouc and Prof. David L. Robbins, Charles University, Prague. 2008–17. Graduated.
  23. Supervised a B.A.-level thesis (Petra Landerová) “Vertiginous Relations in Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms & Mourning Becomes Electra”. 2011–12. Graduated.
  24. Supervised a B.A.-level thesis (Hana Moravčíková) “The Function of Seymour Glass in the Conceptual and Textual Persona and Fictional Output of J.D. Salinger”. 2011–12. Graduated.
  25. Supervised an M.A.-level thesis (Iva Martináková) “Beyond Horror: or, Exploring Connections Between E.A. Poe’s Writings and A. Hitchcock’s Cinema”. 2010–12. Graduated.
  26. Supervised a B.A.-level thesis (Jana Samková) “Kurt Vonnegut’s Humor in Three Cinematic Adaptations”. 2010–12. Graduated.
  27. Supervised a B.A.-level thesis (Tomáš Bazika) “Orson Welles: Film Noir and its Aesthetic Legacy”. 2012–13. Graduated.
  28. Supervising an M.A.-level thesis (Petra Landerová) “The Representation of the Female Body in US Prose Fiction.” 2012–16. Graduated.
  29. Supervised an M.A. thesis (Lucie Halášková) “Modernity and the Changing American South: Alienation in Selected Fiction by Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty”. 2013–15. Graduated.
  30. Supervised a Ph.D. thesis on materialist aesthetics in Generation X writers from the United States by Melinda Morvay (M.A., the University of Constantine the Philosopher, Nitra, 1999), 2009. Terminated study for personal reasons and due to new degree requirements. Unfinished.
  31. Supervised an M.A.-level thesis (Daniel Litochleb), 2012–. Unfinished.
  32. Supervised an M.A.-level thesis (Julie Začková), “Representing Race on Screen: The Concept of African-American Pain through the Lens of European-American Film-Makers”. 2012–15. Graduated.
  33. Supervised a B.A.-level thesis (Lenka Šimková) on US Crime TV Series & Cultural-Studies. 2011–. Unfinished.
  34. Supervised a B.A.-level thesis (Kristýna Seidlová) “On the Psychology of Human Desire of Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’sand of Steinbeck’s East of Eden”. 2011–13. Graduated.
  35. Supervised an M.A.-level thesis (Iva Vejvodová) on “The Portrayal of Racial and Ethnic Stereotypes in American Animated Cartoons”. 2011–12. Graduated.
  36. Supervised a Ph.D. thesis (Christopher Gonzales) (B.A. in English Literature-San Diego State University, MA in Liberal Arts and Sciences- San Diego State University) on “From the Sages of Oral Tradition to the Pages of Gothic Fiction: Examining Folklore and Rural Tradition in the Gothic Canon, and Beyond”. 2012–17. Unfinished.
  37. Supervised an M.A.-level thesis (Jan Mackal) on “Henry James & His Stance Towards Aestheticism & Decadence”. 2013–15. Graduated.
  38. Supervised an M.A.-level thesis (Andreas Patenidis) “Spatio-Temporality in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury”. 2013–15. Graduated.
  39. Supervised an M.A.-level thesis (Matej Moravec) “American Suburbia from 1950s to 1980s: The Development of the Image of Suburbia in the Short Stories of John Cheever, John Updike, and Raymond Carver”. 2013–14. Graduated.
  40. Supervised a B.A.-level thesis (David Kudrna) “The Comic in Henry James’s Fiction”. 2013–16. Graduated.
  41. Supervised a B.A.-level thesis (Anastasia Molozina) “Representations of Freedom, Belief, and Democracy in Selected Beat Authors, Pynchon, and O’Connor”. 2013–. Unfinished.
  42. Supervised a B.A. thesis (Lucia Szemetová) “Deconstructing the Fantastic World of Wes Anderson: The Philosophy Behind the Artificial Surface of a Contemporary Director”. 2015–16. Graduated.
  43. Supervised an M.A.-level thesis (Přemysl Černík) on “The Great Gatsby vs. Trimalchio: Nick Carraway Reconsidered”. 2015–17. Unfinished.
  44. Supervised a B.A. thesis (Karolína Kašparová) “The Political Aspect of Literature: Criticism of a (Neo-)conservative Community”. 2017–18. Graduated.
  45. Supervised a B.A. thesis (Václav Kyllar) “Woman’s Revolt: Revolt in Women’s American Prose of the End of the 19th Century”. 2017–19. Graduated.
  46. Supervised an M.A. thesis (Jason Burleson) “The Function of Paranoia in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow“. 2014–19. Graduated.
  47. Supervised a Vilém Mathesius Prize-winning M.A. thesis (Alex Russell) “David Foster Wallace, Technology and the Self”. 2018–19. Graduated.
  48. Supervised a Vilém Mathesius Prize-winning B.A. thesis (Anna Cranfordová) “Postmodernities in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49“. 2019. Graduated.
  49. Supervised a Vilém Mathesius Prize-winning M.A. thesis (Teja Šosterič) “Labyrinths in Postmodernism: Danielewski, Pynchon, Wallace”. 2019–20. Graduated.
  50. Supervised a Ph.D. thesis by Evgenia Konoreva (M.A. in English and Intercultural Studies, Charles Univ.)“The Lacanian Concept of Sexuation as an Alternative to the Genderqueer Paradigm”. Successful viva held 20 December 2022. Thesis readers: docent Josef Fulka, Philosophy Department, Faculty of Humanities, Charles University and doctor Gabriel Tupinambá, Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Socials—IFCS, Universidade Federal de Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazílie. 2014/15–22. Graduated.
  51. Supervised a B.A. thesis (Andrew Buring) “American Capital and American Art: How Some Escaped and Others Did Not”. 2018–20. Unfinished.
  52. Supervised an M.A. thesis (David Kudrna) “Mental and Ontological Simulacra: Non-Rationality and Non-Reality in Works by Philip K. Dick”. 2018–20. Graduated.
  53. Supervised an M.A. thesis (Marek Torčík) “Objectivity Disguised: Ideas of Authenticity in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon and Paul Auster”. 2019–20. Graduated.
  54. Supervised an M.A. thesis (Darya Kulbashna) “Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain and René Daumal’s Mount Analogue: From Pataphysics to Power”. 2019–20. Graduated.
  55. Supervised an M.A. thesis (Simona Milotová) “Agents without Agency: A Study of Archetypes and Society in Works of Edith Wharton”. 2020–21. Graduated.
  56. Supervised a B.A. thesis (Alžběta Rückl) “Forms of Alienation and Loss in Hemingway’s Texts”. 2020­–21. Graduated.
  57. Supervised a B.A. thesis (Markéta Karlasová) “Aspects of Temporality in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Early Novels”. 2020–22. Unfinished/topic area changed.
  58. Supervised an M.A. thesis (Dunja Ilić) “Between Mainstream and Avant-Garde Filmmaking: The French New Wave and the Illusion of Realism”. 2021-22. Graduated.
  59. Supervised a B.A. thesis (Julia Lessova) “A Comparative Analysis of the New African-American Narratives and Critical Voices of Toni Morrison, Angela Davis, Al Sharpton, and Patrisse Cullors”. 2021–22. Graduated.
  60. Supervising an M.A. thesis (Oksana Kozachukhnenko) “The Force of Rhetoric: James Baldwin and the Era of Digital Media”. 2021–present.
  61. Supervised an M.A. thesis (Klára Nekvasilová) “The Body, Mind, and Lost Generation in Hemingway and Fitzgerald”. 2020–21. Graduated.
  62. Supervised an M.A. thesis (Thuy Luongova) Nostalgia for the Hyperreal: Communities, Myths and Metamodern Sensibilities. 2022–23. Unfinished.
  63. Supervised an M.A. thesis (Jyoti Verma) Film Theory Meets Philosophy: On Orson Welles’s Film Noirs and Postwar USA. 2022–23. Graduated.
  64. Supervised an M.A. thesis (Bota Koilybayeva) “On Animal Subjectivity in Contemporary US Cinema”. 2022–23. Graduated.
  65. Supervised an M.A. thesis (Roksolana Fedorenko) “Lost in Time: The Concept of Temporality in Works of the US Lost Generation”. 2021–24. Will graduate.
  66. Supervised an M.A. thesis (Snezhanna Markova) Towards a new social media model: redistribution of power in the subscription-based creator economy. 2023–24. Will graduate.
  67. Supervised an M.A. thesis (Oksana Kozachukhnenko) “The Force of Rhetoric: James Baldwin and the Era of Digital Media”. 2021–24. Will graduate.
  68. Supervising a Ph.D. thesis (Darya Kulbashna) Note All and Nothing: Indeterminacy of Meaning in the Writing of Samuel Beckett and Experimental Music of the New York School. 2021–present.
  69. Supervising a Ph.D. thesis (Batuhan Lüleci) On Exilic Writing including Said, Adorno, et. al. 2021–present.
  70. Supervising a Ph.D. thesis (Peter L’uba) On Art and Life with Emerson, Nietzsche, and Rancière. Title to be finalized. 2022–present.
  71. Supervised an M.F.A. thesis at FAMU International (Antoine Dossin) Building bridges from Friedrich Nietzsche, to László Krasznahorkai and Béla Tarr: the shadows of Nietzsche’s perspectival existentialism in the novels of Krasznahorkai and films of Tarr. 2022–24. Will graduate.
  72. Supervising a Ph.D. thesis (Botagoz Koilybayeva) On Animal Subjectivity in Film: Multispecies Documentaries and the Cinematic Umwelt. 2023–present.
    1. Official Consultant: For Richard Olehla for a Ph.D. thesis on Thomas Pynchon, 2003–11. Graduated.

Opponencies:

Author of more than 71 official reader’s reports as the opponent of various Habilitation (1), PHD (4), MFA (1), MA (35) and BA (30) theses from 1998–present, including, e.g.,

  1. Lucie Kloubková, “Slave Narratives: Journeys Towards an Identity?” (MA, 1998) among others.
  2. Petra Key, “Slave Narratives: Journeys Towards an Identity?” (MA, 1998).
  3. Jan Jonák, BA thesis on Thomas Pynchon (BA, 1999).
  4. Jan Jonák, “Beloved and the Common Ground in Select African American Novels” (MA, 2000).
  5. Zuzana Šemberová, “Toni Morrisonová a české překlady jejích románů” (MA, 2000).
  6. Aleš Kaňka, “Some Notes on Motifs and Structure in Pale Fire” (MA, 2000).
  7. Radka Schlosserová, “Symbolism of names in Toni Morrison’s novels (in the relationship to the concept of power and control)” (MA, 2001).
  8. Maria Knoflíčková, “Construction and Deconstruction of Racial Identity in Toni Morrison” (MA, 2005).
  9. Hana Slováčková, “S. Bellow’s Sammler’s Planet, Herzog” (MA, 2005).
  10. Kamila Xenie Vetišková, “The Aesthetics of A Lie of the Mind” (MA, 2005).
  11. Linda Petřiková, “Between Literature and Cinema: Edith Wharton’s and Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence” (MA, 2005).
  12. Dita Salavová, “Post 9-11 Hollywood” (MA, 2005).
  13. Zuzana Pokorná, “Word made Flesh: Re-Creating Identity in Toni Morrison’s Beloved” (MA, 2005).
  14. Dagmar Junková, “An Ambiguous Triumph: Evolving Stereotrypes of Local Color Fiction in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening” (MA, 2005).
  15. Kryštof Chamonikolas, “Fictional Paths to ‘A Larger Truth’ in American New Journalism” (MA, 2006).
  16. Karolína Jelínková, “William Faulkner’s Light in August: Constructing Race in the Community” (MA, 2006).
  17. Damian Manire, “‘Living’ Europe: The Alien Impressions of Henry James and Lambert Strether” (MA, 2007).
  18. Zuzana Buriánková, “Adaptation—Mimesis, Transformation, Interpretation” (MA, 2007).
  19. Safwan Naser, “‘The Emersonian Pynchon'” (MA, 2007).
  20. Bibiana Machátová, “Edward W. Said : Postcolonial Studies and the Politics of Literary Theory” (MA, 2007).
  21. Johana, Labanczová, “Copy, Imitation, Forgery as an Artistic Principle in the Novel Chatterton by Peter Ackroyd” (BA, 2010).
  22. Veronika Stankovianská, “Literary Semiotics in the Early Works of Harry Matthews” (BA, 2010).
  23. Hana Slováčková, “The Disappointment of the Western Intellectual in the Twentieth-Century (in Saul Bellow’s novels Mr. Sammler’s Planet and Herzog)” (MA 2005/2010).
  24. Ali Daghman, “Giving a Voice to the Other: Said’s Theory of Anti-Colonial Discourse” (MA, 2010).
  25. Kristýna Patočková, “The Depiction of the Changing Consciousness of Women in Three Novels of the Turn of the Century” (MA, 2010).
  26. Michal Mecner, “Robert Frost: The Village and Beyond” (MA, 2010).
  27. Jakub Boguszak, “King Lear on on Screen” (BA, 2010).
  28. Martina Šindelářová, “Fictional Political Mirroring in Two Novels by Vladimir Nabokov” (BA, 2010).
  29. Karolina Vančurová’, “Affinities Between the Poetry of Wallace Stevens and Paul Valéry” (MA, 2011).
  30. Kateřina Hůlková, “Toni Morrison: Magical Realism Serving to Outline Cultural Experience” (BA, 2011).
  31. Blanka Maderová, “Self, Speech and Agency: Emerson, Melville and Bartleby—Beyond Pragmatism and Performativity” (PhD, 2011). Graduated.
  32. Ivan Marinovíc, “Alternative Storytelling Principles And Their Rendering In Contemporary Revisionist Western” (MFA, FAMU International, CDM, 2011).
  33. Matěj Moravec, “The Depiction of Ethnicity in the Short Stories of William Saroyan” (BA, 2012).
  34. Marek Linhart, “Myth in American Advertising after 1945” (MA, 2013).
  35. Martin Lauer, “Instability of Character in Sam Shepard’s Work of the 1970s” (MA, 2013).
  36. Ádám Hushegyi, “A Rite of Passage: The Transformation of Anglo-American Comic Books in the Post World-War II Era” (BA, 2014).
  37. Michaela Žůrková, “The New York School Poets and Visual Arts: The Poetry of John Ashberry and Frank O’Hara” (BA, 2014).
  38. Tereza Pospišilová, “Faith and the Search for Identity in the Works of J.D. Salinger” (BA, 2015).
  39. Victoria Hädler, “Elements of the Grotesque in the Novels of Toni Morrison” (BA, 2015).
  40. Magdalena Císlerová, “Free of Inhibitions and Full of Pleasure: The Image of Europe in the Work of James Salter” (BA, 2015).
  41. Elena Tkacheva, “Not Quite a Juggler of Identities: Joseph Brodsky’s Translations within the American Literary Tradition” (BA, 2016).
  42. Martin Šinaľ, “An Analysis of Francis Fukuyama’s Arguments Exemplified on Contemporary Dystopian Cultural Production” (MA thesis passed, 2016). MA exam taken and passed 2/2017.
  43. Pavel Gonçarov, “Internet Memes And Their Significance For Myth Studies” (external examiner for Palacký University, Olomouc, PhD submitted 2016). Viva passed 4/2017.
  44. Jan Suk, “The Poetics of Immanence: Performance Theatre of Forced Entertainment” (PhD, 2016). Viva passed 4/2017.
  45. Peter Luba, “Pragmatic Method, Transformation, Perspectivism, and Individualism: The Cornerstone of Pragmatism Laid by Ralph Waldo Emerson” (BA, 2019). Viva passed 6/2019.
  46. Tomaš Kovařík, “Triangulating Agency: Identity, Society and Politics in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man” (BA, 2019). Viva passed 9/2019.
  47. Zdeněk Polivka, “Between Nostalgia and Pragmatism: Cormac McCarthey’s Border Trilogy” (MA, 2019). Viva passed 9/2019.
  48. Adéla Zeimannová, “Emerson’s Self-Reliance as a Core Value of American Society” (BA, 2019). Viva passed 9/2019.
  49. Tatiana Kupková, “The Search for Meaning in Donald Barthelme’s Work” (BA, 2020).
  50. Barbora Tomášková, “The American Notion of Freedom: Freedom as a Central Element of American History and Its Reflection in Literature” (BA, 2020).
  51. Jamie Rose, “Ongoing Queerness: The Flourishing of Trans Women’s Literature in North America” (MA, 2020).
  52. Jana Benadiková, “Getting the Picture: An Analysis of Narrative in E. L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel” (BA, 2020).
  53. Klára Staňková, “The Problematics of Race in Selected Writings of Toni Morrison” (BA, 6/2021).
  54. Klára Staňková, “The Problematics of Race in Selected Writings of Toni Morrison” (BA, 9/2021).
  55. Michal Otahal, “The Legacy of Invisible Man: Ralph Ellison’s Influence on Fight Club” (BA, 2021).
  56. Tereza Ottová, “Nomina nuda tenemus: Postmodernist Method in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire” (BA, 2021).
  57. Kristýna Bularzová, ““The Same River Twice”: An Analysis of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Steven Spielberg’s Film Adaptation” (BA, 2021).
  58. Adéla Zeimmanová, “What It Means to Be American?: Creating American National Identity” (MA, 2021).
  59. Peter Ľuba, “Ralph Waldo Emerson, Friedrich Nietzsche, John Dewey, and the Creative Reader” (MA, 2021).
  60. Daniela Rydlová “(In)Sincere Authorship – Three Novels of Jeffrey Eugenides” (MA, 2022).
  61. Magdalena Matoušková, “The Mechanism of Lynching in William Faulkner’s Light in August” (BA, 2023).
  62. Michail Kiristaev, “Indie Rock Poetry: Arctic Monkeys’ Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not” (BA, 2023).
  63. Yaren Gezer, “Notes from the House of Sleep: Reading the Hieroglyphs of Night-Language in Anais Nin, H.D., and Anna Kavan” (MA, 2023).
  64. Tomáš Veselý, “We Are All Metamoderns: An Introduction To Metamodernism” (MA, 2024).
  65. Dr. Jiří Flajšar, “The Suburban Novels of Richard Yates”, (external examiner for Palacký University, Olomouc). Report submitted 2/24. Habilitation proceedings in progress.
  66. Ondřej Polák, “Language as a Virus of the Mind: The Thinking and Writing of William. S. Burroughs” (BA, 2024).
  67. Julia Lessová, “Masks, Veils, and Invisibility: Racial Passing in Afro-American Literature” (MA, 2024).
  68. Emanuela Maltese, “Postcolonial Reading of James Baldwin” (PhD, 2024).
  69. Danila Gudkov, on Flannery O’Connor, (MA, 2025). Forthcoming.
  70. Thea Šebková, “Geography is Destiny: Globalization in Urban Spaces in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange and Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (BA, 2025) Forthcoming.
  71. Lucie Malcová, “Beyond What Is Written: Sexuality, Gender, and Spirituality in The Color Purple” (BA, 2025) Forthcoming.

Freebie Video Series Attached to Classes Taught (7):

—Winter semester 1998, 2000, 2005, and 2009; Summer semester 1999, 2000, and 2018.

Lacan Reading Group (1):

—Winter 2010.

Selected faculty member committee work:

  1. Appointed to/served on the board of examiners for the MA-level examination multiple times in Literary and Cultural Theory, Charles University, e.g. 9/2020 (Chair of Committee), 9/2023 (Chair of Committee), 2/2024 (Chair of Committee), and 9/2024 (Chair of Committee), English Literature, Charles University (6/2021), and in US literature, Charles Univ.-Prague (33 sessions): 10/1997, 5/1998, 2/2000, 5/2004, 2/2006, 9/2006, 9/2007, 1/2008, 5/2008, 9/2008, 5/2009, 9/2009, 2/2010 (no exam held), 5/2010, 9/2010, 2/2013, 2/2015, 9/2015, 2/2016, 6/2018, 9/2018 (no exam held), 5/2019, 9/2019 (Chair of Committee), 6/2020 (Chair of Committee), 9/2020 (Chair of Committee), 6/2021 (Chair of Committee), 9/2021 (Chair of Committee), 6/2022 (Chair of Committee), 9/2022 (Chair of Committee), 9/2023, 2/2024 (Chair of Committee), 6/2024 (Chair of Committee), and 9/2024 (Chair of Committee).
  2. Appointed to/served on the board of baccalauréat examiners for the BA-level examination in US literature, Charles Univ.-Prague (31 sessions): 10/1997, 2/2000, 2/2001, 5/2003, 5/2004, 9/2004, 2/2005, 9/2005, 9/2006, 9/2007, 9/2008, 5/2009, 9/2009,  6/2010, 6/2011, 9/2011, 6/2013, 9/2013, 6/2014, 6/2015, 2/2016, 6/2016, 9/2018, 6/2019 (Chair of Committee) and 9/2019 (Chair of Committee), 6/2020 (Chair of Committee), 9/2020 (Chair of Committee), 6/2021, 9/2021 (Chair of Committee), 6/2022 (Chair of Committee), and 6/2024.
  3. Examined/read BA-level and MA-level theses in US literature, Charles Univ.-Prague (48 sessions): 6/1998, 9/1998, 9/1999, 2/2000, 2/2001, 9/2001, 9/2002, 5/2003, 9/2004, 2/2005, 5/2005, 9/2005, 2/2006, 9/2006, 9/2007, 5/2008, 2/2010, 1/2011, 6/2011, 9/2011, 2/2012, 9/2012, 2/2013, 6/2013, 9/2013, 6/2014, 9/2014, 6/2015, 2/2016, 9/2016, 2/2017, 6/2018, 6/2019, 9/2019, 1/2020, 6/2020, 9/2020, 6/2021, 9/2021, 6/2022, 1/2023, 2/2023, 9/2023, 2/2024, 6/2024, and 9/2024.
  4. Appointed to/served on the Board of Examiners for the Doctoral Studies Examination (22 sessions only): (Chair) Viva defense session: 11/2023 for Vít Bohal. Pass. 2/2010. Viva defense: 6/2009 for Dagmar Pegues. Pass. Viva defense: 2/2010 for Richard Stock. Pass. Viva defense and on the dissertation defense committee: 6/2011 for Christopher Koy, for Blanka Maderová and for Richard Olehla. All pass. Exam in Literature: 6/2011 for Tereza Stejskalová. Pass. Exam in Literature: 4/2012 for Vít Vaníček. Pass. Exam in Literature: 9/2012 for Jan Suk. Pass. Exam in Literature: 9/2012 for Jakub Ženíšek. Pass. Viva defense and on the dissertation defense committee: 4/2012 for Vít Vaníček. Pass. Viva defense: 9/2017 for Stephan Delbos. Pass. Exam in Literature: 9/2020 for Evgenia Konoreva, for Františka Zezuláková Schormová, for Kateřina Kovarová and for Veronika Krajicková. All pass. Viva defense: 12/2020 for Františka Zezuláková Schormová. Pass. Viva defense: 11/2021 for Jana Marešová. Pass. Exam in Literature: 10/22 for Vít Bohal. Pass. Viva defense: 12/2022 for Evgenia Konoreva. Pass. Exam in Literature: 9/2023 for Darya Kulbashna. Pass. Exam in Literature: 6/2024 for Václav Kyllar. Pass. Exam in Literature: 6/2024 for Peter L’uba. Pass.

Paid sabbatical leave at Charles University:

—Winter Semester, 2006; Summer Semester, 2014; Summer Semester, 2023.

(II) F.A.M.U. (Film and T.V. Faculty Academy of Performing Arts), Prague, Czechia, faculty member in Cinema Studies, re-named F.A.M.U. International, 10/03-present. Worldwide students including from Brown University, Charles University, Cornell University, Fordham University, Haverford College, Indiana University, New School (NYC), Occidental College, Pomona College, Rice University, Smith College, Tulane University, UC-Berkeley, UC-Irvine, Universität Wien, USC,  Whitman College, Yale University, etc.

Classes taught (45) and forthcoming (3):

  1. ‘Film History and Theory I’, Cinema Studies program, F.A.M.U.-Prague, Winter semester 2003. The FAMU Dean, Michal Bregant, taught the other section of the class.
  2. ‘Film History and Theory II’, Cinema Studies program, F.A.M.U.-Prague, Summer semester 2004. The FAMU Dean, Michal Bregant, taught the other section of the class.
  3. ‘Circulating within the Modern Cinematic Image’ FAMU International, F.A.M.U.-Prague, Winter semester 2004.
  4. ‘Circulating within the Postmodern Cinematic Image’ FAMU International, F.A.M.U.-Prague, Summer semester 2005.
  5. ‘Circulating within the Modern Cinematic Image’ FAMU International, F.A.M.U.-Prague, Winter semester 2005.
  6. ‘Circulating within the Postmodern Cinematic Image’ FAMU International, F.A.M.U.-Prague, Summer semester 2006.
  7. ‘Circulating within the Modern Cinematic Image’ FAMU International, F.A.M.U.-Prague, Winter semester 2006.
  8. ‘Circulating within the Postmodern Cinematic Image’ FAMU International, F.A.M.U.-Prague, Summer semester 2007.
  9. ‘Circulating within the Modern Cinematic Image’ FAMU International, F.A.M.U.-Prague, Winter semester 2007.
  10. ‘Circulating within the Post-modern Cinematic Image’ FAMU International, F.A.M.U.-Prague, Summer semester 2008.
  11. ‘Circulating within the Modern Cinematic Image’ FAMU International, F.A.M.U.-Prague, Winter semester 2008.
  12. ‘Circulating within the Post-modern Cinematic Image’ FAMU International, F.A.M.U.-Prague, Summer semester 2009.
  13. ‘Circulating within the Modern Cinematic Image’ FAMU International, F.A.M.U.-Prague, Winter semester 2009.
  14. ‘Circulating within the Post-Modern Cinematic Image’ FAMU Interational, F.A.M.U.-Prague, Summer semester 2010.
  15. ‘Circulating within the Modern Cinematic Image’ FAMU International, F.A.M.U.-Prague, Winter semester 2010.
  16. ‘Circulating within the Post-Modern Cinematic Image’ FAMU Interational, F.A.M.U.-Prague, Summer semester 2011.
  17. ‘Circulating within the Modern Cinematic Image’ FAMU International, F.A.M.U.-Prague, Winter semester 2011.
  18. ‘Circulating within the Post-Modern Cinematic Image’ FAMU Interational, F.A.M.U.-Prague, Summer semester 2012.
  19. ‘Circulating within the Modern Cinematic Image’ FAMU International, F.A.M.U.-Prague, Winter semester 2012.
  20. ‘Circulating within the Post-Modern Cinematic Image’ FAMU International, F.A.M.U.-Prague, Summer semester 2013.
  21. ‘Circulating within the Modern Cinematic Image’ FAMU International, F.A.M.U.-Prague, Winter semester 2013.
  22. ‘Circulating within the Post-Modern Cinematic Image’ FAMU International, F.A.M.U.-Prague, Summer semester 2014.
  23. ‘Circulating within the Modern Cinematic Image’ FAMU International, F.A.M.U.-Prague, Winter semester 2014.
  24. ‘Circulating within the Post-Modern Cinematic Image’ FAMU International, F.A.M.U.-Prague, Summer semester 2015.
  25. ‘Circulating within the Modern Cinematic Image’ FAMU International, F.A.M.U.-Prague, Winter semester 2015.
  26. ‘Circulating within the Post-Modern Cinematic Image’ FAMU International, F.A.M.U.-Prague, Summer semester 2016.
  27. ‘Circulating within the Modern Cinematic Image’ FAMU International, F.A.M.U.-Prague, Winter semester 2016.
  28. ‘Circulating within the Modern Cinematic Image’ FAMU International, F.A.M.U.-Prague, Summer semester 2017.
  29. ‘Circulating within the Modern Cinematic Image’ FAMU International, F.A.M.U.-Prague, Winter semester 2017.
  30. ‘Circulating within the Post-Modern Cinematic Image’ FAMU International, F.A.M.U.-Prague, Summer semester 2018.
  31. ‘Circulating within the Modern Cinematic Image’ FAMU International, F.A.M.U.-Prague, Winter semester 2018.
  32. ‘Circulating within the Post-Modern Cinematic Image’ FAMU International, F.A.M.U.-Prague, Summer semester 2019.
  33. ‘Circulating within the Modern Cinematic Image’ FAMU International, F.A.M.U.-Prague, Winter semester 2019.
  34. ‘Focus on Film Theory and History’, (two sessions only in a team-taught course), FAMU International, F.A.M.U.-Prague, Winter semester 2020.
  35. ‘Circulating within the Modern Cinematic Image’ FAMU International, F.A.M.U.-Prague, Winter semester 2020.
  36. ‘Circulating within the Post-Modern Cinematic Image’ FAMU International, F.A.M.U.-Prague, Summer semester 2021.
  37. ‘Focus on Film Theory and History’, (two sessions only in a team-taught course), FAMU International, F.A.M.U.-Prague, Winter semester 2021.
  38. ‘Circulating within the Modern Cinematic Image’ FAMU International, F.A.M.U.-Prague, Winter semester 2021.
  39. ‘Circulating within the Post-Modern Cinematic Image’ FAMU International, F.A.M.U.-Prague, Summer semester 2022.
  40. ‘Focus on Film Theory and History’, (two sessions only in a team-taught course), FAMU International, F.A.M.U.-Prague, Winter semester 2021.
  41. ‘Circulating within the Modern Cinematic Image’ FAMU International, F.A.M.U.-Prague, Winter semester 2022.
  42. ‘Focus on Film Theory and History’, (two sessions only in a team-taught course), FAMU International, F.A.M.U.-Prague, Winter semester 2022.
  43. ‘Circulating within the Post-Modern Cinematic Image’ FAMU International, F.A.M.U.-Prague, Summer semester 2023.
  44. ‘Focus on Film Theory and History’, (two sessions only in a team-taught course), FAMU International, F.A.M.U.-Prague, Winter semester 2023.
  45. ‘Circulating within the Post-Modern Cinematic Image’ FAMU International, F.A.M.U.-Prague, Summer semester 2024.
  46. ‘Circulating within the Modern Cinematic Image’ FAMU International, F.A.M.U.-Prague, Winter 2024.
  47. ‘Focus on Film History and Theory I’ (two sessions for a team-taught course), FAMU International, F.A.M.U.-Prague, Winter 2024.
  48. ‘Circulating within the Postmodern Cinematic Image’ FAMU International, F.A.M.U.-Prague, Summer 2025.

(I) Magdalen College, Oxford and Mansfield College, Oxford, UK, as doctoral candidate tutored US literature (Magdalen on the invitation of David Norbrook, ed., The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse: 1509–1659, Penguin) 1996 and twentieth-century literature in English (Mansfield on the invitation of Robert Young, ed., Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, Routledge Kegan & Paul), 1996.

INVITED APPOINTMENTS:

  1. Taught six sessions only as a guest professor for a seminar “Readings in Czech/Bohemian Culture: Kafka, Kundera and Hrabal,” Charles University-Prague (American Institute of Foreign Study), Summer semester, 2001.
  2. Taught five sessions only as a guest professor for a seminar “Readings in Czech/ Bohemian Culture: Kafka, Hrabal and Klima,” Charles University-Prague (American Institute of Foreign Study), Winter semester, 2001.
  3. Vermont College Union Institute & University (later re-named Union Institute & University), Montpelier, Vermont, United States, Adjunct Professor as field faculty advisor and examiner to MA (3) and to PhD (1) students in Graduate Program. 2002–2010. One supervised MA student included Richard Boling, (Harvard University, B.A. 1971) who wrote his thesis on Film and Postmodern American Sensibility.
  4. Collegium Hieronymi Pragensis (College of Jerome of Prague), Prague, Czechia, taught a single class only as invited international guest professor, “Literature and Philosophy of the Late Austro-Hungarian Empire” 9/04–12/04.
  5. Université de Provence (Aix-Marseille I), Aix-en-Provence, France, unanimously elected into a Visiting Professorship (“Professeur Invité, 2nd class, 5th echelon, index 820″) May 2005 only.
  6. CERGE-EI and the School of Humanities at Charles University, Professor in the ‘Undergraduate Program in Central European Studies’ (UPCES), selected semesters only to teach and/or to tutor Independent Study in the subjects of Central European Cultural History, Central European Cinema, Kafka, and Psychoanalysis & Cultural-Studies; 41 courses total taught or projected including regular seminars (35) as well as independent study classes (4). U.S. students from top-level Canadian, U.S. and U.K. institutions (Columbia, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, McGill, Michigan, Middlebury, Princeton, Oxford, Pennsylvania, Richmond, Swarthmore, Tulane, Wesleyan, Yale, etc.) as well as from Charles University. Recent and current courses: “Lines of Light: Central European Cinema” Spring semester 2014 (overall evaluation 4.0/5), “Kafka in Prague” Spring semester 2012 (overall evaluation 4.0/5), Fall semester 2015, Spring semester 2016: e.g. overall evaluation 4.3/5, Fall semester 2016 (overall evaluation 4.23/5), Fall semester 2017 (overall evaluation 4.11/5), Spring semester 2018 (overall evaluation 4.44/5), Fall semester 2018 (overall evaluation 4.28/5), Spring semester 2019, Fall semester 2019, Fall semester 2022, Spring semester 2024, and Fall semester 2024; “Psychoanalysis and Cultural-Studies” Spring semester 2012 (overall evaluation 4.3/5), Fall semester 2012, Spring semester 2013 (overall evaluation 4.1/5), Fall semester 2013, Spring semester 2014, Fall semester 2014, Fall semester 2015, Spring semester 2016; Spring semester 2017 (overall evaluation 4.32/5), Fall semester 2017, Spring semester 2018 (overall evaluation 4.44/5), Fall semester 2018 (overall evaluation 4.28/5), Spring semester 2019, Fall semester 2019, Fall semester 2022, Spring semester 2023, Fall semester 2023, Spring semester 2024, and Fall semester 2024. Independent Study: “Psychoanalysis & Cultural-Studies” Spring semester 2015 (w/1 student, overall evaluation 5.0/5.0), Fall semester 2016 (w/4 students, overall evaluation 4.88/5). “Central European Film, Photography, & Psycho-Analysis” Spring semester 2011 (overall evaluation 4.9/5) and “Czech New Wave & New German Cinema (Das Neue Kino)” Fall semester 2010 (overall evaluation 4.8/5).
  7. ECES-Charles University taught selected semesters the subject of international cinema (students attended my course held concomitantly at FAMU) from 2007–10.
  8. University of New York-Prague, COURSES (5) : ‘Great Books’ Fall 2009 and Spring 2011 (2). ‘Composition 2 ’ Spring 2011 (1). ‘The Rise of the West’ Summer 1 (intensive course), 2010 (1). ‘American Literature & Culture’ Fall 2010 (1). SEMINARS (4) : ‘Introduction to Literature’ (seminar) Fall 2010 and Fall 2011 (2). ‘Analysis and Interpretation of Literature’ (seminar) Fall 2010 (1). ‘Introduction to Literary Modernism’ (seminar) Fall 2011 (1). DIRECTED INDEPENDENT STUDY COURSES (12) : ‘Adorno & Critical Theory’ 6–8/2011 (4 students). ‘The Short Story’ 2–5/2012 (2 students). ‘US Literature, 1870–1945’ 2–5/2012 (1 student). ‘The Great American Novel’ 6–7/2012 (2 students). ‘American Poetry’ 10/2012–1/2013 (2 students). ‘History of English Language’ 10/2012–1/2013 (2 students). ‘Introduction to Literature’ 10/2012–1/2013 (2 students). ‘American Literature: 1600–1865’ 2–5/2013 (3 students). ‘American Poetry’ 2–5/2013 (2 students). Currently (3) : ‘Analysis and Interpretation of Literature’ 9/2013–1/2014 (2 students)  ‘History of the English Language’ 9/2013–1/2014 (1 student) ‘Introduction to Literary Modernism’ 9/2013–1/2014 (1 student).
  9. Affiliate Associate Professor formerly Visiting Scholar, English Department, University of Washington-Seattle, for comparative cultural research (invited by dr. Robert McNamara, prof. Brian M. Reed, Chair) officially 15 June–30 September, 2015 and invited again from dr. McNamara and prof. Reed for 1 June–30 September 2016. This Visiting Scholar status with library privileges (including online access) was extended to 30 September 2017 and again for: 1 January–31 December 2018 and from prof. Anis Bawarshi, Acting Chair, 1 January–15 September 2019. The English Department faculty voted in a quorum in May 2019 to change my status to Affiliate Associate Professor, which is a higher rank. This new status has now been approved by the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences as effective from 16 September 2019. * cf. ACADEMIC APPOINTMENTS and AWARDS/GRANTS

EDUCATION:

  1. University of Washington, 9/85–6/87, 6/88–8/88, and 6/91–8/91, Seattle, Washington. Classes include American Literature (Joseph Butwin), Anthropology (David H. Spain), Appreciation of Architecture (Hermann Pundt), Art History (Martha Kingsbury), Astronomy (Bruce Balick), Composition (Pamela Fox), French (Hedwige Meyer), Geography (Douglas Jackson), Geology (Stan Charnicoff), Mathematics (Stacy), Psychology (Mark Pagel), Reading Fiction (Suzanne Matson), Shakespeare (Gerald John “Jack” Brenner), Social Psychology, Sociology, Spanish (Darlene Lake, Dianne Pruit) and The Ancient World/History (Jon Bridgman, The Revolt of the Hereros, University of California Press).
  2. Pomona Program at University College, Oxford (director Charles Wenden, Bursar, All Souls College) Oxford, UK, Fall 1988, individual one-on-one “Milton” tutorial with weekly essays worth two-courses equivalent at Pomona College in Christ Church College, Oxford with Robert Maslen (Elizabethan Fictions, Clarendon Press), and with the Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity, Rowan Williams; a British Politics seminar at Univ. College; and a British Architecture three-student-tutorial in the Stanford University Centre at Oxford with the Stanford director and architectural historian Geoffrey Tyack (Oxford: An Architectural Guide, Oxford University Press): Grade point average 4.0 out of a possible 4.0.
  3. Bachelor of Arts, Cum Laude, Pomona College, 14 May 1989, Concentration: English, Claremont, California. Teachers include Martha Andresen (California Professor of the Year, 1992) (‘Shakespeare’), Stephen A. Erickson (Yale Ph.D. at age 23) Language and Being, Yale University Press; The (Coming) Age of Thresholding, Kluwer Academic Publishers) (‘Western Philosophy Thru Its History’), Michael Kuhlwein (‘Macroeconomics’), James Leigh (‘Advanced 19th Century American Literature Seminar’ on H. James-S. Crane), Cristanne Miller (‘Senior Seminar’) (Cultures of Modernism, University of Michigan Press), Brian Stonehill (Self-Conscious Fiction from Joyce to Pynchon, University of Pennsylvania Press) (‘Modern American Literature’), and J. William Whedbee (The Bible and the Comic Vision, Cambridge University Press) (two courses: Biblical Heritage and New Testament). Senior seminar project: “The Concept of Fate in Beowulf”.
  4. The University of Western Australia (St. Columba College), Perth, Australia, 2/93–11/93. Full-time non-degree humanities student. Marks: French A, English Special Studies 599 A+ (the latter constituted 75% of an M.A. coursework degree). Perth Rotary Club counselor: Harry William Sorensen, Chancellor-Curtin University of Technology.
  5. University of Oxford/École Normale Supérieure exchange, Winter and Spring 1995, Paris, France, D.Phil. research, especially for the Balzac component; seminars attended include “Questions de responsabilité” in which the present scholar studied directly under Jacques Derrida (Glas, Galilée), E.H.E.S.S. three hour bi-weekly seminars from February-July 1995, in which we read side by side, Maurice Blanchot and Martin Heidegger; audited “Les pouvoirs et les limites de la psychanalyse” with Julia Kristeva, l’Université de Paris VII-Denis Diderot.
  6. Doctor of Philosophy, University of Oxford (Linacre College), Oxford, UK, 19 July 1997, thesis topic area: “Money and Power in Henry James”, doctoral student 10/91–12/92, 1/94–6/97. Supervisor: Mike L.H.L. Weaver, Reader in American Literature, Linacre College, Oxford, then ed., History of Photography (Taylor & Francis). D.Phil. examiners: Terence Francis Eagleton, Thomas Warton Professor of English, St. Catherine’s College, Oxford; and Maud Ellmann, Reader in Modern Literature, King’s College, University of Cambridge; now Endowed Professor of English, University of Notre Dame (USA).–Oxford Amnesty International Lecture Series attended 2/92: lectures given at St. Aldate’s and at the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford by the following teacher-scholars: Wayne Booth, Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida, Frank Kermode, Julia Kristeva, Paul Ricoeur, and Edward Said.——At Oxford as a D.Phil. candidate attended poetry readings/lectures by then Oxford Professor of Poetry, Seamus Heaney, and class sessions/lectures in the English and French faculties by John Bayley (Keats and Hardy), Malcolm Bowie (All Souls College, attended post-graduate year-long seminar on “Theoretical Approaches to Textual Analysis”), John Carey (Milton), Terry Eagleton (Lukács and Marxist Theory), Barbara Everett (Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature), Tim Farrant (Balzac), Alison Finch (Balzac), Robin Lane Fox (history), Emrys Jones (Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature), Jeri Jonson (Feminist Theory), Donald F. McKenzie (Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts), Tony Nuttall (Shakespeare), Alan Raitt (Balzac), Jon Stallworthy (textual analyses of handwriting in e.g., Wilfrid Owen and W.B. Yeats), Mike Weaver (Photography), Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (visiting lecture series on African-American literature), Arthur Miller (Visiting Cameron Mackintosh Chair of Contemporary Theatre), Jacqueline Rose (visiting lecture series on colonialism and writing), Elaine Showalter (visiting lectures on Freud and women), George Steiner (visiting lecture series on comparative literature), Roger Chartier at All Souls College, Oxford, Sir Frank Kermode (New College Seminar), Jürgen Habermas (St. Catherine’s College event, introduced by Bernard Williams, All Souls College), Jean Baudrillard at the Maison Française d’Oxford and Noam Chomsky at the Oxford Museum of Modern Art, among others; on Supervisor’s Night February 1992 at Linacre College Oxford I hosted the critic, teacher and novelist John Bayley and his companion the novelist Iris Murdoch.

PUBLISHED BOOKS:

  1. The Dialectics of Late Capital and Power: James, Balzac and Critical Theory. 1 July 2007. Cambridge Scholars Publishing (UK). This tome conceptualizes the vanguard concepts of ‘un-power’ and of ‘un-money’ and illumines the relational configurations and dialectical connectedness between various types of capital and power (including, but not limited to, the complicity of the cultural form of the novel with social mechanisms of power) by engaging with selected narratives by Henry James and his grand literary model, Honoré de Balzac.
    Dust jacket: a Georg Jensen designed silver bowl from 1912.
    ISBN 1–84718–226–7
    220 x 150 (mm)
    xviii + 312pp. 1 ill.
    Hardback
    UK: £34.99, US: $52.99. Backcover endorsements from: 1) Stephen A. Erickson, Professor of Philosophy and the E. Wilson Lyon Chair of Humanities, Pomona College 2) Alision Finch, Professor and Senior Research Fellow, Churchill College, University of Cambridge 3) Henry B. Wonham, Professor of English, University of Oregon.A review 2015: http://www.graat.fr/review_roraback.htmlGerardo Del Guercio, York College, The City University of New York
  2. The Philosophical Baroque: On Autopoietic Modernities. 23 March 2017. Brill (est. 1683) (Leiden/Boston). From the flyer: › Hardback (xvi + 295 pp. 3 ill.) › ISBN: 9789004323278 › List price: €110 / $132 › Language: English › Literary Modernism, 2 › Imprint: BRILL In his pioneering study The Philosophical Baroque: On Autopoietic Modernities, Erik S. Roraback argues that modern culture, contemplated over its four-century history, resembles nothing so much as the pearl famously described, by periodizers of old, as irregular, barroco. Reframing modernity as a multi-century baroque, Roraback steeps texts by Shakespeare, Henry James, Joyce, and Pynchon in systems theory and the ideas of philosophers of language and culture from Leibniz to such dynamic contemporaries as Luhmann, Benjamin, Blanchot, Deleuze and Guattari, Lacan, and Žižek. The resulting brew, high in intellectual caffeine, will interest all who take an interest in cultural modernity—indeed, all who recognize that “modernity” was (and remains) a congeries of competing aesthetic, economic, historical, ideological, philosophical, and political energies. R E V I E W S :“Erik Roraback’s The Philosophical Baroque: On Autopoietic Modernities is a great book that will engage an energetic and important subfield of scholarship.”- William Egginton, The Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, The Johns Hopkins University, author of The Theater of Truth: The Ideology of (Neo) Baroque Aesthetics (Stanford University Press). For more information see https://www.brill.com/limoA review 15 February 2018https://journals.openedition.org/erea/6147By William Egginton, The Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, The Johns Hopkins University
  3. The Power of the Impossible: On Community and the Creative Life. Iff Books, Winchester/Washington, 2018. X + 384 pp. 3 ill. iff-books.com Paperback | ISBN: 978–1–78535–149–5 | $29.95  |  £17.99 | 8.5×5.5 inches 216x140mm x + 384 pp.  3 ill. e-book | ISBN: 978–1–78535–150–1 | $23.99  |  £13.99The following backcover endorsements appear on the work:“Learned, exigent, original, and timely, Erik Roraback’s Community and the Creative Life presents authoritative readings of what important theorists from Spinoza to Bataille, Blanchot, Nancy, Žižek, and others have had to say about community and the individual, with sections along the way on how those theorists might lead us to approach work by Henry James, James Joyce, Ralph Ellison, Dante Alighieri, and, surprisingly, the great tennis player, Ivan Lendl. Roraback also develops on the basis of his theorists his own persuasive concept of an impossible/possible global community yet to come that would facilitate individual creativity as well as contest the repressive hegemony of finance capitalism and technology, especially digital technology.”—J. Hillis Miller, The University of California at Irvine. “A spirited, luminous romp through theory, literature—and professional tennis! This original, unorthodox study illuminates our current crises of community formation and creativity in ways unexpected but necessary.”—Robert Appelbaum, Chair and Professor of English Literature, Uppsala University, SwedenA review 15 December 2021https://journals.openedition.org/erea/12764 by Ian James, Professor of Modern French Philosophy and Literature, Downing College, University of Cambridge

    WORK IN PROGRESS:

    (IV) Producing Forms of Cinematic Cultural Capital: Circulation, Movement, and Thought, Volume I.  This textual project on cinema as a form of thought and of politics that promotes new forms of freedom and equality for the twenty-first century contains 125,000 words. The endeavor deploys writings on cinema by Giorgio Agamben and Gilles Deleuze, Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of history, Pierre Bourdieu’s social theory, Fredric Jameson’s engagement with the Marxian problematic, and Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory. Also enlisted are Jacques Lacanian-Slavoj Žižekian theoretical psychoanalysis, Jacques Rancière’s “indisciplinarity” and axiomatic of an equality of intelligence in his account of the appropriation of the sensible and of the politics and aesthetics of cinema, and Bernard Stiegler’s pharmacology and notion of the era of disruption. The study aims to differentiate new post-capitalist utopian forms of capital in circulation, of movement and of thought for the elucidation of new forms of life and so of what can be enacted, discovered and seen with the cinematographic image. In so doing it aims to discover for the active spectator new non–sadistic and non-authoritarian ways of moving, circulating, thinking and being within the cinematic frame. As against the dominant cinematic apparatus and economic system of circulation and circulationism, the active spectator in this study engages with the cinematic image for a novel progressive form of circulating and movement force, the cultural capital of egalitarian and cooperative ‘non-power’; or, put otherwise, the ‘un-power’ of cinematic cultural ‘non-capital’. This subversive circulationism deactivates things for the conditions of possibility of an emancipated subject and future. The study thus constitutes an account of a conflict over the sensible with regard to circulation, movement, and thought. Objects analyzed include gestures, ideas, movies, and scenes from the superstar directors D.W. Griffith, Fritz Lang, F.W. Murnau, Orson Welles, Michelangelo Antonioni, Alain Resnais, Chantal Akerman, and Terrence Malick.

    (III) Working on a textual enterprise on Forms of Experience & Commodity Culture: Transnational Cultural Modernisms in USA literature as well as in the Continental European writings of Theodor Adorno, Georges Bataille, Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, and Joyce’s 1922–39 Paris Project, Finnegans Wake.

    (II) Writing a treatise on Forms of Cinematic Cultural Capital: Circulation, Movement, and Thought, Volume II. See the above description of Volume 1. Objects analyzed include gestures, ideas, movies, and scenes from the superstar directors Buster Keaton, Carl-Theodor Dreyer, Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein, Orson Welles, Andrei Tarkovsky, Michelangelo Antonioni, Maya Deren, Hito Steyerl, Yasujiro Ozu, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

    (I) Producing a treatise on Forms of Life; or, Melancholic Subjectivity, Modes of Production, and the Utopian Rhetoric of Shakespeare’s ‘King Richard II’ (c. 1595). The textual project contains 50, 000 words, and owes its genesis to an essay I wrote for a Pomona College Senior Seminar in Spring Semester 1989 on King Richard II under the teaching of Martha Andresen, Paul Mann, and Cristanne Miller.

PUBLICATIONS:

  1. Commissioned research done on Henry James for The Age of Elegance: The Paintings of John Singer Sargent (London: Phaidon Press, 1996). UK. ISBN–10: 0714835447. ISBN–13: 978–0714835440
  2. “Money, Temporality and Bio-Power in The Ambassadors“. Litteraria Pragensia 9.17 (1999): 1–25. (Journal published at the Centre for Comparative Studies, Charles University, Prague, and distributed in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.) A revised version of this work will be republished in the abovementioned James-Balzac book.
    ISSN 0862–8424.
  3. Contributing author with Martin Procházka, with Justin Quinn and with Hana Ulmanová to Lectures on American Literature, Prague, Karolinum: Charles University Press, 2002. 313pp. The present scholar’s contribution homes in on Post War American prose fiction.
    ISBN 80–246–0358–6.
  4. “Folding St. Petersburg Communities: Spaces and Subjectivities” for a special issue on Image + Identity. Arcade: Architecture/Design in the Northwest 21.1. Seattle, Washington (Autumn, 2002): 28–29. USA. This piece forms an interdisciplinary (Deleuze and Nancy-inspired) epilogue for the present author’s baroque book.
  5. “Medicine, Money, Writing, Hermeneutics: James’s The Wings of the Dove”. Litteraria Pragensia 12.24 (2002): 48–64. Prague. ISSN 0862–8432.
  6. “Artistic Authority, Interpretation and Economic Power: Joyce’s Finnegans Wake“. Hypermedia Joyce Studies 4.1 (2003). URL: http://hjs.ff.cuni.cz/archives/v3/roraback.html ISSN 1801–1020.
  7. “Future Directions for Intercultural Studies as Education Globalizes: An American Scholar’s Perspective at Charles University, Prague”. Parallax: A Journal of International Perspectives 1.1 (Fall 2003): 67–73. Boston, USA. This piece formalizes certain dimensions of interdisciplinary teaching and research both within and outside Charles University, with particular reference to the present scholar’s attempts at inter-disciplinary pedagogical work at Charles in Prague. ISSN 1549–0645.
  8. “New Pathways through Pynchon”. Pynchon Notes, issue 50–51 (copyright date 2004) 174–82. USA. The review article of American Postmodernity: Essays on the Recent Fiction of Thomas Pynchon, ed. Ian D. Copestake (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2003) gives the survey of the book and builds on its multi-tiered insights from multiple contributors by fleshing out or even just suggesting other avenues for new lines of approach. ISSN 0278–1891.
  9. “Para-Baroque Conceptual Intersections and Interventions: Finnegans Wake, Gravity’s Rainbow and L’Écriture du désastre (The Writing of the Disaster)“. Hypermedia Joyce Studies, 5.2 (2005). This article probes the inter-linkages between three major works of twentieth-century prose to highlight their shared and hidden Baroque features. URL: http://hjs.ff.cuni.cz/archives/v3/roraback2.html
    ISSN 1801–1020.
  10. “The Colors and the Spinozist Bodies of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura (The Adventure or The Fling, 1959)”. EREA 3.1 (Spring 2005): ix–xviii, Université de Provence. France. This interdisciplinary reading of Antonioni employs the writings of Deleuze and Spinoza to home in on the post modern body in a classic work of post-war European film; it constitutes a first version of a chapter in the present author’s cinema book. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/erea.620 ; URL: https://doi.org/10.4000/erea.620
    ISSN 1638–1718.
  11. “Interdisciplinarity and Gilles Deleuze’s Le pli: Leibniz et le baroque (The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque)”. Litteraria Pragensia 15.29 (2005) 39–47. Prague. This article analyzes an important late work of Deleuze and builds on its insights through the filter of Leibniz´s own texts; the foregoing informs one subunit of a germinating baroque book-length textual endeavour adduced below. ISSN 0862–8424.
  12. “Circulating within Orson Welles’s Mr. Arkadin/Confidential Report for a Newly Armed Eye”. Theory and Practice in English Studies, Volume 4: Proceedings from the Eighth Conference of English, American and Canadian Studies. Brno: Masaryk University, 2005. 227–33. Brno. The article interrogates one of Welles´s most under-rated films as a way to reflect on the true nature of power and authority as they pertain to the act of the viewer´s moving within the cinematic frame; it forms one chapter for a fifteen-chapter-length incubating film book outlined below under “work in progress”. ISBN 80–210–3836–5.
  13. “Jean-Luc Nancy, Being-in-Common and the Absent Semantics of Myth”. Time Refigured: Myths, Foundation Texts & Imagined Communities, eds. Martin Procházka & Ondrej Pilný. Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2005. 121–35. Prague. This chapter attempts to elucidate the chief contours of Jean-Luc Nancy’s ideas on community and myth, notions that fly in the face of canonical takes on these two dense topic areas. ISBN 80–7308–102–4.
  14. “Cracking from the Air—Modern and Postmodern Examples of the Baroque” a review article on Gregg Lambert’s The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture (London: Continuum, 2004). EREA 3.2 (Autumn 2005), Univ. de Provence. France. This piece offers up a critique of and response to an important recent book in the field of modern and postmodern baroque studies. The article was quoted in the 2007 Continuum Philosophy catalogue and currently is cited on bloomsbury.com and amazon.com. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/erea.581 ; URL: http://journals.openedition.org/erea/581
    ISSN 0862–8424.
  15. An article “Re-Framing Modernity; or, A Literary and Philosophical Baroque”. Parallax: A Journal of International Perspectives Centennial issue 4.1 (Fall 2006): 125–38. Boston, USA. ISSN 1549–0645.
  16. “Culture and a New Experience of Democracy” in EREA 4.2 (Autumn 2006), Université de Provence. France. This review-article on Thomas Docherty’s Aesthetic Democracy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006) offers up a critique of Docherty’s post-Immanuel Levinásian critique of the problem of contemporary aesthetics and political democracy. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/erea.692 ; URL: https://doi.org/10.4000/erea.620
    ISSN 1638–1718.
  17. A chapter number eight contribution on “Slavic Encounters: The Reception of Henry James in the Czech and Slovak Lands”. The Reception of Henry James in Europe, ed. Annick Duperray, series editor Elinor Schaffer, from The Athlone Critical Tradition Series, London/New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 2006. 124–38 and 324–27. UK/USA. This chapter traces the response to James’s work by scholars and readers in Bohemia, in Moravia, and in Slovakia, including the presence of such James scholars as F.O. Matthiesen who taught at the Charles English division in 1947, the Charles Ph.D. René Wellek who later exfluxed to Britain and to the United States, and to a very minor extent the present scholar’s own experiences teaching and lecturing on James (in 3 M.A.-level seminars, in 10 B.A.-level survey classes, and in 3 special lecture series components), and in publishing two articles on James at Prague: one on The Ambassadors and another on The Wings of the Dove. The piece received special recognition from the series editor, Dr. Elinor Schaffer, Fellow of the British Academy.
    ISBN 0826458807.
  18. “Dialectizing Subjectivity with Sartre and with Adorno”; a review article on David Sherman’s Sartre and Adorno: The Dialectics of Subjectivity (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007). EREA 5.2 (Autumn 2007), Univ. de Provence. France. In: E-REA. 2007, vol. 5, issue 2. This piece of work gives an interpretive critique of and response to an important recent volume in the field of Sartre, Adorno and subjectivity studies. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/erea.656 ; URL: http://journals.openedition.org/erea/656
    ISSN 1638-1718.
  19. “A Chiasmus of Baroque Forms of Existence, Community, and Spectrality: Benjamin–Debord”. Litteraria Pragensia 17.34 (2007) 101–18.
    The article received special mention from a board that read the journal.     ISSN 0862-8424.
  20. Cosmic Auto-Poetic Self-Reference, Participation & Actuality: Citizen Kane (1941). Parallax: Journal of International Perspectives, Volume V, Number 1 (Fall 2008) (Boston) 17 pages-long; pp. 109-25. This scholarly article (a subunit of the present scholar’s larger film project) engages systems theory, among other modelings, to throw light on Welles’s early-style magnum opus. ISSN 1549–0645.
  21. A ‘Future First’ Silence; or, Welles’s Chimes at Midnight and Shakespeare. Shakespeare: Between the Middle Ages and Modernism: From Translator’s Art to Academic Discourse. A Tribute to Professor Martin Hilský, OBE. Edited by Martin Procházka and Jan Cermák. Prague: Charles University, Faculty of Arts, 2008. 15 pages-long; pp. 166–80; book 267 pp. Anotace: This academic article engages and enlists the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, of Walter Benjamin and of Martin Heidegger in an attempt to throw new light on Orson Welles’s late-style Shakespeare film; it consitutes one text among several in a volume of essays that celebrates prof. Martin Hilský’s 65th Birthday; part of a maturing cinema volume by the present scholar.
    ISBN 978–80–7308–244–4.
  22. “Gothic Components and Gothic Globality of Balzac’s Early-Style Le Centenaire, ou, Les Deux Béringhelds (1822) [The Centenarian: or, The Two Beringhelds (trans. 2005)]” . Gothic N.E.W.S., Volume 1: Literature Edited by Max Duperray. Paris: Michel Houdiard Éditeur, 2009. pp. 202–18; book 348 pp.; the text grew out of a presentation given on 26 June at the International Gothic Association ‘Gothic N.E.W.S.’ conference held at Aix-en-Provence, France, 25–29 June 2007. This contribution engages a largely unknown early Balzac piece of prose fiction Le Centenaire, ou, Les Deux Béringhelds (1822) [The Centenarian: or, The Two Beringhelds] and in so doing illumines some of the text’s gothic aspects and how these elements allow us ways of meditating on a fledgling globalization and globality in the early nineteenth century. ISBN 978–2–35692–008–9.
  23. A Benjamin Monad of Guy Debord & W.D. Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885); or, Individual & Collective Life & Status as Spectacle . Profils américains, 21: William Dean Howells, ed. Guillaume Tanguy. Montpellier: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2009. 28-pages-long; pp. 165–92; book 303 pp. This article illuminates Howells’s early-style The Rise of Silas Lapham as an exemplary text of Walter Benjamin’s monad via its forceful blending of Benjamin’s corpus of texts and of the foregoing Howells-novel; Debord’s theories of the spectacle society and Benjamin’s fecund work on topic areas germane to The Rise of Silas Lapham (perhaps the first American novel about a business man, per se) are brought into relief to show how the literary history that Howells makes finds its sense in work by Benjamin and by Debord. The foregoing is the first book-length publication published on Howells in France. ISBN 978–2–84269–880–5.
  24. Niklas Luhmann and Forms of the Baroque Modern; or, Structure, System and Contingency. The Prague School and Theories of Structure: Interfacing Science, Literature, and the Humanities / ACUME 2, Vol. 1 Edited by Martin Procházka / Markéta Malá / Pavlína Šaldová (eds.). Goettingen: V&R unipress, 2010. pp. 363–78; book 469 pp. This contribution elucidates some main contours and baroque elements in Niklas Luhmann’s late twentieth-century systems theory and further than this, it comprises a component of the present author’s ongoing baroque project. ISBN 978–3–89971–704–4.
  25. “Heretical Capital: Walter Benjamin’s Cultic Status in Cultural and Theoretical History”. Piece originally presented at a colloquium on “Cult Fictions, Film and Happenings”, Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic, 4–9/9 2005. Olomouc. Editor: Arbeit, Marcel, inter alia, The Moravian Journal of Literature and Film. no. 3 (Spring 2010), published by Filosofická Fakulta, Palacký University, Olomouc. The topic area of that issue is “Cult Fiction and Cult Film: European Perspectives”. Anotace: This article dishes up a critique of first-rate readings of Benjamin given by such cultural critics as Adorno, Arendt, Bersani, Jay, and Susan Buck-Morss, among others, in order to underscore Benjamin’s radically cultic function today.
  26. A chapter “The Social and the Negative: F.W. Murnau’s Der Letzte Mann (The Last Laugh, 1924) and Walter Benjamin’s ‘Angelus Novus’ ” as part of a book in honor of prof. Peter Demetz’s (Yale University) 85th Birthday from a conference on “The Landscape without Qualities: Literature and Central Europe” at the Dept of Czech and Comparative Literature, Faculty of Arts, Charles University-Prague, & at the Austrian Cultural Forum, 23–25 October 2007.  Krajina bez vlastností: Literatura a Střední Evropa / Landschaft ohne Eigenschaften: Literatur und Mitteleuropa. Peteru Demetzovi k 85. Narozeninám / Festschrift für Peter Demetz zum 85. Geburtstag. Petr A. Bílek, Tomáš Dimter (eds.). Aktion, Praha, 2007/2010, pp. 247–63. 344pp. This scholarly article formalizes the question of the social and of the unthought in connection to F.W. Murnau’s film Der Letzte Mann (The Last Laugh, 1924) and to Walter Benjamin’s demonic angel of history.
  27. Author of a chapter in an academic book: “A Multiplicity of Folds of an Unconscious ‘Crystal’ Monad: James, Benjamin, and Blanchot”. Supplemental online chapter S 68–77. Henry James’s Europe: Heritage and Transfer. Dennis Tredy, Annick Duperray and Adrian Harding, eds. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2011. 294 + S 92pp. ISBN 978–906924–36–2. This chapter outlines a constellation, a monad combining and so linking the aesthetic capacities, propensities and achievements of the cultural work and conceptual personae of Henry James, of Walter Benjamin, and of Maurice Blanchot.
  28. Author of a feature essay in a literary-cultural journal: “Nejsvětější svátosti v americké próze Nad Thomasem Pynchonem” / “Among the Holy of Holies of Prose Fiction in U.S. English; or, on Thomas Ruggles Pynchon” A2, Thomas Pynchon & Literární Paranoia, 7.21, 12.10.2011, 22–23. Z anglického original přeložila Anna Vondřichová. English original URL: http://www.advojka.cz/archiv/2011/21/amongthe-holy-of-holies-of prose-fiction-in-u-s-english-or-on-t This article illuminates some distinguishing characteristics of Thomas Pynchon’s narrative work in order to show that it is the special aesthetic space that he creates that from one critical angle of vision truly matters in his aesthetic universe.
  29. Introduction, Aftermath, 1970-2000, the sections on Thomas Pynchon, Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut, David Foster Wallace, and Lydia Davis, part of the section on Ralph Ellison. In: Lectures on American Literature, Third Edition. Editor: Justin Quinn. Prague: Univerzita Karlova v Praze, 2011. Pp. 277–80, miscellaneous from pp. 257–58 and 298–305. An introduction on post 1970 United States literary and cultural history written for a coursebook.
  30. A book chapter “The Dialectic of Adorno-Jameson, Deleuze-Guattari, U.S. Cultural Modernity, Utopias of ‘Becoming’, & After”printed in Prague in a translational treatment into Czech by Linda Petříková and by Tereza Stejskalová as “Adornova-Jamesonova dialektika, Deleuze-Guattari, kulturní modernita USA, utopie “dění” a poté”.  Moderní svět v zrcadle literatury a filosofie. Ed. Miroslav Petříček. Praha: Herrmann & synové/Univerzita Karlova, 2011, pp. 180–191, 288 pp. ISBN  ISBN 978–80–87054–28–4.  This article essays to profile some major contours of the understanding of US-American culture and of its utopian and anti-utopian configurations vis-a-vis Theodor W. Adorno and to a lesser extent more abstractly on the lattermost conceptual categories more than on the United States per se from Fredric Jameson, from Gilles Deleuze and from Félix Guattari.
  31. A book chapter on “A Gateway to a Baroque Rhetoric of Jacques Lacan & Niklas Luhmann”. In: Prague English Studies and the Transformation of Philologies Volume Eds. Martin Procházka, Ondřej Pilný. Praha: Univerzita Karlova v Praze/Charles University in Prague, 2012, pp. 166–83, ISBN: 978–80–246–2156–2. This chapter articulates the ideological content and the rhetorical nature (including the baroque aspects) of selected works by the French psychoanalytic thinker Jacques Lacan (1901–81) and the German systems theorist Niklas Luhmann (1927–98) and, where applicable, the mediatory roles of the Prague philosopher Ladislav Rieger (1890–1958), of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), who lectured to the members of the Prague Philosophical Circle in 1935, and of the founding member of the Circle and the first Professor of English Language and Literature at Charles University, Vilém Mathesius (1882–1945).
  32. “The Dialectical Legacies of Jacques Derrida’s Glas”. In: Tis to Create and in Creating Live: Essays in Honour of Martin Procházka. Eds. Ondřej Pilný and Mirka Horová. Prague: Karolinum Press, 2013, 327 pp., pp. 228–237, ISBN: 978–80–7308–445–5.
  33. An entry on “Fassbinder, Rainer Werner” in Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception. Volume 8. Eds. Allison, Jr., Dale C. / Helmer, Christine / Seow, Choon-Leong / Spieckermann, Hermann / Walfish, Barry Dov / Ziolkowski, Eric. Berlin: De Gruyter Press, 2013, 1200 columns, columns 901–903, pp. 451–52, ISBN: 978–3–11–018376–4.
  34. “Slavic Encounters: The Reception of Henry James in the Czech and Slovak Lands“. In: The Reception of Henry James in Europe The Athlone Critical Traditions Series: The Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe Editor: Duperray, Annick, Series Editor Schaffer, Elinor. London/New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014, 381 pp. ISBN 978–1–4725–3593–1, pp. 124–138 and 325–328. UK/USA. Paperback edition. First published in 2006 by the Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd. This second and updated version of an already published scholarly chapter traces the response to James’s work by scholars and readers in Bohemia, in Moravia, and in Slovakia, including the presence of such James scholars as F.O. Matthiesen who taught at the Charles English division in 1947, the Charles Ph.D. René Wellek who later lived in Britain and settled permanently in the United States, and to a very minor extent the present scholar’s own experiences teaching, lecturing, and publishing two articles on James in Prague. The text received special recognition from the series editor, Dr. Elinor Schaffer, Fellow of the British Academy.
  35. “An Aesthetic & Ethical Revolutionary on the U.S.-American Road: Theodor W. Adorno in Los Angeles & in New York, 1938–53”. Forthcoming in A View from Elsewhere. Editor: Arbeit, Marcel. Olomouc: Palacký University, 2014. Will be printed in February 2015. This scholarly text outlines some of the basic coordinates of Theodor W. Adorno’s time spent living and working in the United States in the period of time from 1938-1953. It evaluates both Adorno’s cultural output and the nature of the reception of his intellectual work while in the US, and the formative influence his American experience had on his last years as a cultural producer in Germany from 1954-1969.
  36. A book chapter on “Emancipating Forms Of Death With Polanyi And Leibniz” appeared as Chapter Eleven pp. 267–94 in a volume entitled, Death And Anti-Death, Volume 14: Four Decades After Michael Polanyi, Three Centuries After G. W. Leibniz, ed. Charles Tandy. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Ria University Press, 25 December 2016, 358 pp. Hardback ISBN: 978–1–934297–25–4; Softback ISBN: 978–1–934297–26–1. This opportunity for publication was received as an invitation addressed specifically to me in April 2016. This chapter demonstrates that G.W. Leibniz and Michal Polanyi’s creative work in multiple fields of attention may serve a twenty-first century in need of scholars willing to put daring and speculative imaginative inter-disciplinary risks in play. Such a cultural development would activate a general and cross-cultural sensibility that may salvage knowledge work, which is often predicated on property and power, for instead intellectual work that would serve the production of multiple truths that may enliven the world and inspire it.
  37. A contribution “This is Money & Power; or Thinking Materialism with James & Balzac” pp. 347–64 in a paperback volume sold in bookstores for 23 Euros, Argent, pouvoir et représentations (Money, Power and Representations), sous la direction de (Eds.) Eliane Elmaleh, Pierre Guerlain, Raphaël Ricaud. Paris: Presses universitaires de Paris Nanterre, 2017, 403 pp. ISBN: 978–2–84016–259–9. This article presents a theory of radical materialism and of money capital found in selected writings by Henry James and in Honoré de Balzac’s novel work, Eugénie Grandet. The theory argued for here presents an understanding of materialism and of capital that would be most radical when predicated on something that builds on the life-asserting notions of ‘un-power’ or ‘non-power’, so that in their most significant and substantial form, materialism and capital are about assuming their own symbolic non-existences or basis in nothing. As such, writings by James and Balzac give us the creative opportunity to think afresh the category of wealth and of how it may be redefined in a new understanding of its form and content for the twenty first century.
  38. Journal article, “Pondering Along With Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller’s Thinking Literature Across Continents (2016)”, in Interdisciplinary Literary Studies (Penn State University Press), Vol. 20, No. 2, SPECIAL ISSUE: Thinking Literature across Continents (2018), pp. 151–168. Written for a special number on a new book by Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller, Thinking Literature across Continents (Duke University Press, 2016). The issue features 6 invited essay articles from Ghosh and Miller as well as an introduction. ISSN 15248429.
  39. A 2400-word book review on Where is History Today? New Ways of Representing the Past, eds. Marcel Arbeit and Ian Christie (Olomouc: Palacký University Olomouc, 2015) 208 pp., ISBN 978–80–244–4760–5 in Editor: Arbeit, Marcel, inter alia, The Moravian Journal of Literature and Film. Volume 7, nos. 1–2  (2016), 138–41, published by Filosofická Fakulta, Palacký University, Olomouc. ISSN 1803–7720. Printed in 2019. This review article distills and critiques the essence of the fourteen respective contributions to the 2016–study Where is History Today? New Ways of Representing the Past, under the editorship of Marcel Arbeit and Ian Christie. The piece demonstrates how and why the contributors and editors have produced a highly interesting and searching investigation into the textual and ideological space of ways of delineating, and of expanding, the general sense of forms of history in and for our historical present.
  40. A book chapter, “The Anti-Modern James, Balzac and Barthes” as Chapter Fourteen, pp. 155–66, in Reading Henry James in the Twenty-First Century: Heritage and Transmission, eds. Dennis Tredy, Annick Duperray and Adrian Harding. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019. ISBN 10: 1–5275–3287–9; ISBN 13: 978–1–5275–3287–8. This text focuses on Henry James’s, on Honoré de Balzac’s, and on Roland Barthes’s contributions to an anti-modern sensibility. This is demonstrated both in the light of Antoine Compagnon’s work on the antimodern in Les Antimodernes de Joseph de Maistre à Roland Barthes (2005) and in its own discrete claims and terms, especially with regard to questions of experience, of entertainment culture and of the institution of a more general cultural sensibility; the article extends Compagnon’s idea that to be antimodern is to be anticapitalist. In this study, to be antimodern is to be a true modern, because it denotes that one has fidelity to what is most valuable in our ongoing cultural modernity that dates back to the rude energies of the seventeenth century.
  41. An article entry on “Mark, Gospel of” for “III. Literature” in Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception. (EBR) Volume 17 [Lotus—Masrekah]. Eds. Christine Helmer / Steven L. McKenzie / Thomas Römer / Jens Schröter / Barry Dov Walfish / Eric Ziolkowski. Berlin/Boston: Walter De Gruyter Press, 2019. xxxiv + 641 pp., 30 Fig., columns 1282; columns 941–944, pp. 671–72. ISSN: 2193–2840. ISBN: 978–3–11–031334–5. This article delineates a diverse array of examples from literary, critical and theoretical cultures of the reception and appropriation of the Gospel of Mark. Writers discussed include, inter alia, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Melville, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Heidegger, Lacan, Weil, Harold Bloom, Burton L. Mack and Rowan Williams. Problems of faith, of reception, of misrecognition and of worldly values are also addressed.
  42. A book chapter, “On Capital and Class with Balzac, James, and Fitzgerald” as Chapter Thirty, pp. 398–411, in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Class, ed. Gloria McMillan. New York and London: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2022. Publication date 2 September 2021. Xv + 456 pp. ISBN: 978-0-367-44211-8 (hbk); ISBN: 978-1-032-04294-7 (pbk); ISBN: 978-1-003-00835-4 (ebk). This chapter evaluates the matrix of capital and of class in selected works by Balzac and Henry James, as well as in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, in order to think of new egalitarian ways of thinking through this problematic. The piece enlists critical theory from Giorgio Agamben, Karl Marx, Jacques Rancière, Bernard Stiegler, and Slavoj Žižek, to throw light on this double pronged cultural and material phenomenon.
  43. An article entry on “Mocking of Jesus” for “IV. Literature” in Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception: Midrash and Aggada – Mourning (EBR) Volume 19. Eds. Constance M. Furey, Joel Marcus LeMon, Brian Matx, Thomas Chr. Römer, Jens Schröter, Barry Dov Walfish and Eric Ziolkowski. Berlin/Boston: Walter De Gruyter, 2021. Xxix + 686 pp., 30 Illustrations/20 Coloured illustrations, pp. 528–530. Publication date: September 7, 2021. ISSN: 2193–2840 (online). ISBN: 9783110313369 (hardcover). This article presents multiple portrayals from literary cultures of the mocking and passion of Jesus, ranging from, inter alia, The Dream of the Rood and Piers Plowman to King Richard II, Don Quixote, “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street”, The Trial, Mrs. Dalloway, and Wise Blood, down to the late twentieth century with Gore Vidal’s Messiah to Norman Mailer’s The Gospel According to the Son.
  44. An article entry on “Narrative Criticism, Narratology” for “VI. Literature” in Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception: Mouse, Mice – Nefesh (EBR) Volume 20. Eds. Constance M. Furey, Joel Marcus LeMon, Brian Matz, Thomas Chr. Römer, Jens Schröter, Barry Dov Walfish and Eric Ziolkowski. Berlin/Boston: Walter De Gruyter, 2022. Xxviii + 598 pp., Illustrations/Coloured illustrations, pp. 410–11/Columns 819–821. ISSN: 2193–2840 (online). ISBN: 9783110313376 (hardcover). This article outlines some basic aspects of the function and role of narratology and of narrative criticism and the literary reception of the Bible across national-cultural traditions. The piece also underscores some key contributions and thematic concerns by various schools of criticism.
  45. An article entry on “New Heaven and New Earth” for “Literature” in Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception: Negative Theology – Omniscience (EBR) Volume 21. Eds. Constance M. Furey, Joel Marcus LeMon, Brian Matz, Thomas Chr. Römer, Jens Schröter, Barry Dov Walfish and Eric Ziolkowski. Berlin/Boston: Walter De Gruyter, 2023. Xxix + 643 pp., Illustrations: 34, Coloured Illustrations: 21, pp. 274–76. ISSN: 2193–2840 (online). ISBN: 978–3–11–062827–2. This article profiles some representations of new heaven and/or new earth in multiple literary or theoretical texts by such authors as for example, Augustine of Hippo, Hildegard von Bingen, Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, Miguel de Cervantes, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Henrik Ibsen, James Joyce, Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Pynchon, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. In so doing, the piece suggests the apocalyptic and urgent dimensions of the notions.
  46. An article entry on “New Jerusalem” in Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception: Negative Theology – Omniscience (EBR) Volume 21. Eds. Constance M. Furey, Joel Marcus LeMon, Brian Matz, Thomas Chr. Römer, Jens Schröter, Barry Dov Walfish and Eric Ziolkowski. Berlin/Boston: Walter De Gruyter, 2023. Xxix + 643 pp., Illustrations: 34, Coloured Illustrations: 21, pp. 151–52, columns 302–04. ISSN: 2193–2840 (online). ISBN: 978–3–11–062827–2. This article delineates some examples of the appearance of New Jerusalem in imaginative literature, including Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra, William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Emily Dickinson, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, Gore Vidal’s Live from Golgotha, and poetry from the German Romantic poets, Carl Joachim Friedrich Ludwig Achim von Arnim and Clemens Wenzeslaus Brentano.
  47. An article entry on “Nihilism” in Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception: Negative Theology – Omniscience (EBR) Volume 21. Eds. Constance M. Furey, Joel Marcus LeMon, Brian Matz, Thomas Chr. Römer, Jens Schröter, Barry Dov Walfish and Eric Ziolkowski. Berlin/Boston: Walter De Gruyter, 2023. Xxix + 643 pp., Illustrations: 34, Coloured Illustrations: 21, pp. 229–30, columns 457–59. ISSN: 2193–2840 (online). ISBN: 978–3–11–062827–2. This article explores representations of the idea of negative and positive nihilism in cultural texts by writers such as Shakespeare in Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth, Bertolt Brecht, or Hartmut Lange’s work on Martin Heidegger entitled Positiver Nihilismus: Meine Auseinandersetzung mit Heidegger.
  48. A book chapter, “Toward a New Frame; or, Trans(in)fusing the Capitalocene into Neganthropocene Cultural Capital” as Chapter 7, pp. 87–114, in Trans(in)fusion and Contemporary Thought: Thinking in Migration, edited by Jayjit Sarkar. Lanham, Boulder, New York, London: Lexington Books, Rowman & Littlefield, 2023. Publication date 12 September 203. Xi + 135 pp. ISBN–10: 166935066; ISBN–13: 978–1–66693–506–6 (hbk). For a Forum on Ranjan Ghosh’s Trans(in)fusion: Reflections for Critical Thinking (New York: Routledge, 2021) in the series ‘Transforming Literary Studies’ by Lexington Books, Rowman & Littlefield. The series is edited by Ranjan Ghosh (University of North Bengal) and Daniel T. O’Hara (Temple University). This chapter argues in thinking with James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Bernard Stiegler’s philosophy for a new cultural frame that will transvalue big capital for cultural capital and for a new age, the neganthropocene.
  49. Invited to write an Essay-Review article by the production editor on behalf of the co-editors for the journal, American Literary History, Oxford University Press on the book, To the Collector Belong the Spoils: Modernism and the Art of Appropriation by Annie Pfeifer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2023). This 1200–1500-word article was submitted July 6, 2024, and will be published online in 2025. A link to the most recent issue of the journal: https://academic.oup.com/alh/issue/36/1. Link to the book, https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501767791/to-the-collector-belong-the-spoils/#bookTabs=1

AWARDS/GRANTS/SCHOLARLY VISITS/STAYS:

  1. Yearly High Scholarship Award, 1986–87 (University of Washington).
  2. The Marilyn and Allen Johnson Memorial Scholarship, 1985–86 (University of Washington), 1986–87 (University of Washington), and 1987–88 (Pomona College).
  3. The David L. Edwards Memorial Scholarship, for a Pomona student concentrating in English, 1988–89.
  4. Senior Exercise: Distinction, May 1989.
  5. Rotary Foundation Graduate Ambassadorial Scholar, Perth, Australia, 1993.
  6. Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (from the University of Oxford) one week in 12/94 (for research at Harvard’s Widener Library on Henry James).
  7. A French government grant to study at the École Normale Supérieure, winter and spring 1995.
  8. Oxford University Scholarship for Overseas Students, 1991–92, Autumn 1992, Winter and Spring 1994, and 1994–95.
  9. Overseas Research Student Award from the British government, Autumn 1992, Winter and Spring 1994, and 1994–95.
  10. Paris (from the University of Oxford), one week 5/94, one week 5/96 (for research on Honoré de Balzac at the Balzac Research Center–the Maison de Balzac–and on “French theory” and writing).
  11. University of Oxford, UK, (from Charles University) one week stay for comparative cultural research in the Taylor Institution and in the Bodleian Library, 11/07 and 10/12.
  12. Universität Konstanz, Germany, two-week research stays as a visiting scholar (invite mediated by prof. Aleida Assmann and supported by DAAD German Academic Exchange Service): 1/04, 1/05, 1/06, 2/07, 2/08, 2/09, 1/10, 1/11 , 3–4/13, 6/14, and invited to stay for 6/15 but declined.
  13. Paris, France (from Charles University) short stay for comparative cultural research at various institutions including the library at the Roland Garros museum, the Ecole de la cause Freudienne, and the E.N.S.: 10/11, 10/13, and 10/15.
  14. Winchester, UK, six one-week stays on an Erasmus teacher-scholar exchange program (invited by current dean Alasdair Spark): 1/12, 1–2/13, 1–2/14, 3–4/16, 2/17, 2/19, and 3/20.
  15. Modern Language Association (MLA) Travel Grant awarded to attend as a registered delegate the 127th annual MLA convention in Seattle, Washington, USA, 5–8 i 2012; MLA Travel Grant awarded to attend as a registered delegate the 130th MLA convention in Vancouver, B.C., 8–11 i 2015; MLA Travel Grant awarded to attend as a registered delegate the 135th convention in Seattle, WA, 9–12 i 2020. Attended as a registered delegate the virtual online 136th MLA convention (Toronto, Canada), 7–10 i 2021. Also attended the 112th annual MLA convention in Washington D.C., 27–30 xii 1996. MLA Travel Grant awarded to attend as a registered delegate the 138th MLA convention in San Francisco, California, 5–8 i 2023.
  16. University of Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv, Israel, one-week stay on an exchange program (invited by prof. Shirley Sharon Zisser): 5/12.
  17. Affiliate Associate Professor formerly Visiting Scholar, English Department, University of Washington-Seattle, for comparative cultural research (invited by dr. Robert McNamara, prof. Brian M. Reed, Chair) officially 15 June–30 September, 2015 and invited again from dr. McNamara and prof. Reed for 1 June–30 September 2016. This Visiting Scholar status with library privileges (including online access) was extended to 30 September 2017 and again for: 1 January–31 December 2018 and from prof. Anis Bawarshi, Acting Chair, 1 January–15 September 2019. The English Department faculty voted in a quorum in May 2019 to change my status to Affiliate Associate Professor, which is a higher rank. The vote of the quorum was 45 yes, 0 no and 0 abstain. This new status has now been approved by the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences as effective from 16 September 2019. * cf. ACADEMIC APPOINTMENTS above.
  18. Seattle, Washington, USA from Charles University partial funding two five–week, two six–week, three seven–week, and three eight–week comparative cultural research stays to use the Suzzallo library at the University of Washington-Seattle and to think and to write in good material conditions at Blue Ridge, Seattle, 7–9/12, 6–8/13, 7–8/14, 7–9/15, 7–8/16, 7–8/17, 7–8/18, 7–8/19, 7–8/23, 7–8/24; 7–8/21 and 7–8/22 (self-financed).
  19. High Quality Monograph Recognition and Financial Award for The Philosophical Baroque: On Autopoietic Modernities (Brill, 2017) for the University Wide 2019 Excellent Monograph Competition at Charles University. 29 May 2019 notice from the Rectorate’s Office of Charles University, Prague, Czechia, EU. Monetary value: 135, 980 crowns.
  20.  High Quality Monograph Recognition and Financial Award for The Power of the Impossible: On Community and the Creative Life (Iff, 2018) for the University Wide 2020 Excellent Monograph Competition at Charles University. May 2020 notice from the Rectorate’s Office of Charles University, Prague, Czechia, EU. Monetary value: 135, 380 Czech crowns.

MEMBER OF GROUP GRANTS:

I.  2004–1998 Member: Výzkumný záměr “Srovnávací poetika v multikulturním světě/ New Trends in British and American Cultural Studies” MSM 11200005, English and American Studies, Arts Faculty-Charles University, Prague, Czechia.

II. 2005–11 Member: Výzkumný záměr “Základy moderního světa v zrcadle literatury a filozofie/ Foundations of the Modern World as Reflected in Literature and Philosophy”, MSM 0021620824, English and American Studies/Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, Arts Faculty-Charles University, Prague, Czechia.

III. 2012–16 Member: PRVOUK 09, “Proměny kulturních dějin anglofonních zemí – identity, periody, kánony/ Transformations of Cultural History of Anglophone Countries: Identities, Periods, Canons” Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, Arts Faculty-Charles University, Prague, Czechia.

IV. 2017–22 Member PROGRES Q12, “Literature and Performativity”, Arts Faculty-Charles University, Prague, Czechia.

STAND ALONE/INVITED GUEST LECTURES:

  1. November 1992: paper given on “Henry James and Foucault” in the Linacre College, University of Oxford seminar series. Oxford, UK; invite mediated by Linacre Principal Sir Bryan Cartledge.
  2. (II–XI) November 1993: talk given on “French Post-Structuralism Today” to an audience of some 200 people at the Rotary Club of Perth, Western Australia (one of ten such talks I gave that year on the topic area at clubs throughout Western Australia and at Washington State) with my Rotary Counselor present, Harry William Sorensen, Chancellor, University of Western Australia.
  3. 2001: Hotel Evropa, Prague, Czech Republic, gave a 90 min. talk on “An American Scholar in Prague” to a group of continuing-education-adult-learners from the U.S.
  4. 18 March 2003: “The Colors and the (Spinozist) Bodies of Antonioni’s L’Avventura” at F.A.M.U., Prague, Czech Republic; invite mediated by Dean Michal Bregant.
  5. 25 March 2003: “Cinema against Cinema: Welles and Resnais” at F.A.M.U, Prague, Czech Republic; invite mediated by Dean Michal Bregant.
  6. 8 April 2003: “Excessively Noir Film: Welles’s The Lady from Shanghaiand Touch of Evil” at the Prague Film and Television Faculty of the Academy of Dramatic Arts (F.A.M.U.), Prague, Czechia; invite mediated by Dean Michal Bregant.
  7. 20 November 2003: “Deleuze, Orson Welles and the Cinematic Baroque”, University of Szeged, Hungary.
  8. 20 November 2003: Presented a 45-minute Plenary Lecture, “James, Balzac, and the Politics of Money and Power”, at a conference English and American Studies Days, University of Szeged, Hungary/Europe. Venue: The Headquarters of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Szeged, Chapter “Díszterem”. The other international plenary speaker was prof. Jonathan Veitch, The New School of Social Research, New York City, USA.
  9. 10 May 2005: lecture “Cinema Against Cinema, or The Orson Welles Hit Parade”, English Department, as invited prof. at Université de Provence, Aix-en-Provence, France; invite mediated by prof. Annick Duperray and by prof. Joanny Moulin.
  10. 21 May 2005: conference/lecture “Philosophical and Literary Joy Machines: Deleuze’s The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake”, English Department, as invited professor at Université de Provence, Aix-en-Provence, France; invite mediated by prof. Annick Duperray and by prof. Joanny Moulin.
  11. 21 May 2005: conference/lecture “Literary Space; or, Folding Blanchot onto Pynchon: Enlightenment Reason, the Global System and the Literary Neo-Baroque”, English Department, as invited prof. at Université de Provence, Aix-en-Provence, France; invite mediated by prof. Annick Duperray and by prof. Joanny Moulin.
  12. 24 May 2005: conference/lecture “Deleuzian Film Aesthetics” for a Ph.D. seminar, Film Department., as visiting prof. at Université de Provence, Aix-en-Provence, France; invite mediated by prof. Jean-Luc Lioult.
  13. 9 November 2005: public lecture “Cruelty, Money and Power: Pairing Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet (1833-34) with James’s Washington Square (1881)” given at the American Studies Division, English Department, University College, Cork, Ireland; invite mediated by prof. Damian Bracken.
  14. 10 November 2005: public lecture “Henry James’s The American Scene (1907): Money, Power and ‘Race’” delivered at the Historical Society, University College, Cork, Ireland; invite mediated by the medieval historian prof. Damian Bracken.
  15. 22 November 2005: On the invitation of Dean and prof. Jaroslav Váček gave a talk as a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar alumnus, “Spinoza, Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari for a New Social and a New Economic”, Rotary Club of Prague-Old Town, Hotel Paris, Prague.
  16. 17 January 2006: public lecture “Multisensorial Evocations and Provocations of Lost Paradise: Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)” given at the Research Colloquium of prof. Aleida Assmann, English Department, Universität Konstanz, Germany; invite mediated by dr. Michael Frank.
  17. 16 May 2006: public lecture “Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998) and Circulating within the Heideggerian Cinematic Image”, Philosophy Dept., Universität Wien, Austria; invite mediated by prof. Ludwig Nagl with prof. Herta Docekal-Nagl.
  18. 15 November 2006: public lecture “Shakespeare, Deleuze and Welles’s Chimes at Midnight”, English Department, K.S.U., Manhattan, Kansas, USA. Invite mediated by prof. Don Hedrick as part of an ongoing Charles/K State faculty exchange program.
  19. 17 November 2006: public lecture “Chiasmatic Forms of Baroque Existence, Community and Spectrality: Walter Benjamin and Guy Debord” at the English Department, Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas, USA. Invite mediated by prof. Don Hedrick as part of an ongoing Charles/K State faculty exchange program.
  20. 18 January 2007: lecture “Cinema and Spiritual Life: Dreyer’s Early-Style La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc, 1928)” at The Evergeen State College, Olympia, Washington, USA. Invite mediated by prof. Setsuko Tsutsumi.
  21. 19 January 2010: lecture “Lines of Light; or, Buster Keaton, Silence & the Unconscious” given at the Research Colloquium of prof. Aleida Assmann, English Department, Universität Konstanz, Germany; invite mediated by prof. Assmann & dr. Michael Frank.
  22. 17 July 2010: lecture on “City of Cosmos; or, Community & Communication” for a conference “Understanding the Other/the Stranger/the Foreigner”, University of Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany. Invited by Dr. Barbara Weber.
  23. 19 July 2010: lecture “Orson Welles’s The Trial (1963)”, F.A.M.U., Prague, Czechia. Invited by prof. Ian Buchanan.
  24. 10 May 2012: lecture “The Autopoiesis of Modernity: A Philosophical Baroque”, University of Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv, Israel. Annual Vardi lecture. Invited by prof. Shirley Sharon-Zisser.
  25. 10 September 2012: lecture “Stick to the Dream: New Figures of Temporality & of the Revolution of The Great Gatsby”, University of Colorado-Boulder, Boulder, Colorado, USA. Invited by prof. Paul Levitt.
  26. 10 September 2012: lecture on “Stick to the Dream: New Figures of Temporality & of the Revolution of The Great Gatsby“, University of Colorado-Boulder, Boulder, Colorado, USA. Invited by prof. Paul Levitt.
  27. 17 October 2012: lecture “On Terry Eagleton”, Charles University, Prague, Czechia.
  28. 31 October 2012: lecture “Expression, the Fold, & the Spinozan Opportunity of Existence qua Deleuze & Zizek”, University of Cardiff, Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom. Invited by prof. Christopher Norris.
  29. 22 November 2012: “On Spinoza & Contemporary Culture”, Center for Theoretical Studies at the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czechia. Invited by prof. Ivan M. Havel.
  30. 25 November 2013: “A Few Notes on the Ornate Movements of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916)”, Palacky University, Olomouc, Czechia. Invited by prof. Marcel Arbeit.
  31. 1 April 2016: “Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight (1966), Shakespeare, and our Contemporaneity”, University of Winchester, Winchester, United Kingdom. Given as part of a Five-Year University Visiting Research Fellowship. Introduced and facilitated by dr. Gary Farnell and dr. Nick Rowe.
  32. 16 February 2017. The Philosophical Baroque. The guest lecture showcased the author’s then forthcoming book, The Philosophical Baroque: On Autopoietic Modernities (Brill, 2017). Kingston University, London as part of a Lecture Series for the Kingston Shakespeare Seminar (KiSS) that takes place at the Rose Theatre, Kingston, London, England, UK. Invited by the Sir Peter Hall Professor of Shakespeare Studies, Richard Wilson.
  33. 18 February 2017. Gave an opening Plenary Lecture on “An Anachronistic Figure of Redemption: Modernity, Rhetoric and Self-Identity of Shakespeare’s King Richard II” at a conference on “Shakespeare and Anachronism”, Kingston University, London, United Kingdom. Invited by the Sir Peter Hall Professor of Shakespeare Studies, Richard Wilson. The other invited speaker was prof. Tiffany Stern, Royal Holloway, University of London, London, UK (formerly Professor of Early Modern Drama, University College,  Oxford). Organized by dr. Ildiko Solti.
  34. 13 April 2018. Gave a paper as an Invited Speaker on “Languages and forms of capital in Balzac and James” for a conference on “Balzac et L’Angleterre” / “Balzac and England” at the Maison Française d’Oxford, 12–14 April 2018. Invited by dr. Tim Farrant (Fellow and Reader in French) Pembroke College, University of Oxford.
  35. 13 ii 2019. Gave a guest lecture “On Community and the Creative Life” at the University of Winchester, Winchester, UK as part of a Faculty of Arts Research Seminar Series and a Five–Year University Visiting Research Fellowship. Introduced by dr. Neil Ewen and facilitated by prof. Inga Bryden.
  36. 31 iii 2021. Gave a guest lecture online on “Forms of Cinematic Capital, Circulation, Movement, and Thought” at the University of Winchester, Winchester, UK as part of a Faculty of Arts Research Seminar Series and an Eight–Year University Visiting Research Fellowship. Introduced and facilitated by prof. Inga Bryden. Attendees included, inter alia, multiple from the University of Winchester, Stanley Corngold (Princeton University), Henry Hills (experimental filmmaker, New York City/Vienna), Fredric R. Jameson (Duke University), and Paul Saint-Amour (University of Pennsylvania).
  37. 9 iii 2022. Gave a guest lecture online on “Melancholic Subjectivity, Modes of Production, and the Utopian Rhetoric of Shakespeare’s Richard II (c. 1596)” at the University of Winchester, Winchester, UK as part of a Faculty of Arts Research Seminar series and an Eight–Year University Visiting Research Fellowship. Introduced and facilitated by prof. Inga Bryden. Attendees included, inter alia, multiple from the University of Winchester, Damian Bracken (University College, Cork), Antonio Cerella (Nottingham Trent University), and Christopher Norris (Cardiff University).
  38. 29 iii 2023. Gave a guest lecture online, “On Class, Context, and a Redemptive Commons with the Social Energies of Shakespeare’s Richard II (c. 1596/1623)”, at the University of Winchester, Winchester, UK as part of a Faculty of Arts Research Seminar series and an Eight–Year University Visiting Research Fellowship. Introduced and facilitated by Dr. Daniel Varndell.
  39. 1 xii 2023. Gave a guest lecture, “On Cultural Capital; or, on the Spheric and Moving Cosmic Form of Citizen Kane (1941)” at Charles University, Prague, Czechia as the inaugural opening event for a student-run and organized conference from Schwa on Interdisciplinary American Studies, 1–3 December.

SELECTED LECTURES/ORGANIZED AND INTRODUCED:

I. 27 April 2005: prof. David Cowart (University of South Carolina) on Contemporary American Fiction.

II. 28 April 2008: prof. Hugh Silverman (Stony Brook University), “Being Postmodern Plural and The Sense of the World: From Plato to The Matrix”. The lecture focuses on how to think community as a singular plural in the postmodern plural as an articulation of the ‘sense of the world’ (Jean-Luc Nancy) and as demonstrated in the film The Matrix.

III. 26 November 2008: prof. Valerie Miner, Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research (Stanford University), “Trespass and Settlement: Crossing the Gender Frontier in the American West”.

V. 5 May 2011: prof. Paul Levitt (University of Colorado-Boulder), “The Narrator as Hero in The Great Gatsby”.

VI. 19 May 2011: prof. John T. Matthews, 2010–11 Fulbright Lecturer, Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, Charles University-Prague (Boston University), “Hidden in Plain Sight: The Problem of the South in American Literary Imagination”.

VII. 3 December 2014: Professor Barbara Ladd, Winter semester Fulbright Professor, Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, Charles University-Prague (Emory University, Atlanta), “Beyond the Plantation: Race and Class at the Edge of the Swamp”.

VIII. 8 December 2014: Professor Victor Castellani, Associate Professor of Classics and Humanities; Chair, Dept. of Languages and Literatures, University of Denver, Denver, “Tennessee Williams: On the Kindness of Strangers & the Harshness of Kin”.

IX. 9 March 2015: Dr. James Deutsch, Smithsonian Institution and the George Washington University, “A Psychoanalytical Approach to Folklore”.

X. 18 May 2017: prof. Jennifer Riddle Harding, Summer semester Fulbright Professor, Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, Charles University-Prague (Washington & Jefferson College, Washington, Pennsylvania), “Puns in American Literature and Culture”.

XI. Cancelled 2020: prof. David Hicks, Summer semester Fulbright Professor, Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, Charles University (Regis University, Denver, Colorado).

XII. Cancelled 2022: prof. David Hicks, Summer semester Fulbright Professor, Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, Charles University (Wilkes University, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania).

In addition, I have attended Visiting Lectures by more than 100 guest scholars and writers at Charles University from 1997 to the present, including Gore Vidal, Robert Creeley, Charles Taylor, Gary Snyder, Derek Attridge, J. Hillis Miller, Sacvan Bercovitch, Ishmael Reed, Christopher Norris, James Soderholm, Declan Kibard, Andrew S. Bowie, Jerome J. McGann, Cristanne Miller, Wolfgang Iser, Seamus Heaney, Robert J.C. Young, John Pier, Matthew Guterl, Jahan Ramazani, Ruth Morse, Barry Sheils, Timo Müller, Herbert Blau, Matthew Guterl, Michael E. Rosen, David Heckerl, Florian Deichl, John Edward Hasse, Daniel R. Melamed, Stephen Burt, Bryan Reynolds, Christoph Bode, Matthew Guterl, Timothy Snyder, Carlo Ginzburg, Chantal Mouffe, Drummond Bone, Carolyne Larrington, John Searle, Martin Nekola, Alexandra Borchardt, Eric Nelson, Mark Nixon, Dirk Van Hulle, and Bernd Herzogenrath, inter alia. Other speakers attended in Prague City include Alain Badiou, Daniel Boyarin, Roger Chartier, Martin Nekola, Nick Nesbitt, Jacques Rancière, Kai-Uwe Schrogl, and Slavoj Žižek.

SYMPOSIA/CONFERENCE/WORKSHOP PAPERS/PANELS:

  1. 14 May 1999: Paper given “Authority, Interpretation and Economic Power of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake”, XXth Paris James Joyce Colloquium, 14–15/5 1999. The general topic for this colloquium was “Cashcash caracktericksticks: Joycean Economics.” Venue: Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne and the École Normale Supérieure-Paris, France.
  2. 27 June 2000: Chaired a panel “Doors Opened Into Finnegans ”, and gave a paper on it – “Conceptual Intersections: Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and Blanchot’s L’Écriture du désastre”, XVIIth International James Joyce Symposium, Goldsmith’s College, London, UK, 24–30/6 2000.
  3. Gave a paper “Thomas Pynchon: The Global System and the Enlightenment” for a panel on “Mass Culture—Globalisation or Americanization?”, XXVIIth Congress of the Russian Society of American Culture Studies, Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia, 30/11–7/12 2001.
  4. Paper given “Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari: Notes Toward a Theater to Come” for an international seminar on Gender in Contemporary Drama, St. Petersburg, Russia, 6–9/12 2001. Venue: Znamenka Palace.
  5. Paper proposal “Between Deleuze’s Différence et répétition and Blanchot’s L’Écriture du désastre” was accepted for a panel on “Deleuzian Moves” at the 26th Annual International Association for Philosophy and Literature Conference on INTERMEDIALITIES, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, Holland, 3–8/6 2002 but I was unable to attend for funding fell through from my Prague source. Invited speakers: Mr. Peter Greenaway and prof. Luce Irigiray.
  6. 17 June 2002: Chaired a panel “Joyce, Deleuze and Nancy” and gave a paper on it – “Excessive Baroque Thresholds: Joyce’s Wake and Deleuze’s The Fold”, XVIIIth International James Joyce Symposium, Trieste, Italy, 16–22/6 2002.
  7. 10 October 2003: Presentation given “Blanchot and Pynchon: Intermediaries for a New Narrative Space”, 9th Constance-Prague- Workshop: Mediators and Go-Betweens, 10–11/11 2003, Universität Konstanz, Germany.
  8. 17 June 2004: Chaired a panel “Finnegans Wake at 65: 1939–2004” and gave a paper on it “Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: A Critical and Aesthetic Joy Machine for the Twenty-First Century”, XIXth International James Joyce Symposium, National College of Ireland, Dublin, 12–19/6 2004.
  9. 12 November 2004: A lecture “Jean-Luc Nancy, Being-in-Common and the Absent Semantics of Myth” given at an international conference of the ACUME project, “Mythologies, Foundation Texts and Imagined Communities, Prague, Czech Republic, 5–7/11 2004.
  10. 3 February 2006: A lecture given “Cinematic Movement within Orson Welles’s Mr Arkadin/Confidential Report (1955) for a Newly Armed Eye”, 8th Brno Conference of English, American and Canadian Studies, Masaryk University, Brno, Czechia, 2–4/2 2005.
  11. 6 June 2005: A presentation “Chiasmatic Interventions: Deleuze’s Post-modern ‘Time-Image’ and Orson Welles’s Late Medieval Chimes at Midnight (1966)” given for a panel on “Deleuze and Cinema”, 29th annual conference of the International Association of Philosophy and Literature”, University of Helsinki, Finland, 2–7/6 2005.
  12. Gave a ninety-minute talk “Heretical Capital: Walter Benjamin’s Cultic Status in Cultural and Theoretical History”, 12th Colloquium of American Studies” on “Cult Fictions, Film and Happenings”, Palacký University, Olomouc, Czechia, 5–9/9 2005. Plenary lecturer: prof. Werner Sollors, Harvard University.
  13. 14 May 2006: Delivered a paper “The Necessary Patience and Strangeness of Finnegans Wake”, XLVIe Congrès de la SAES, 12–14/5 2006, Université de Nantes, Nantes, France.
  14. 7 June 2006: Gave a paper “The Mediatization of German Expressionist Cinema and the Politics of Filmic Transposition: Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen (The Ring, 1924)”, 30th annual conference of the International Association of Philosophy and Literature, Universität Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany, 5–10/6 2006.
  15. 15 June 2006: Chaired a panel “Finnegans Wake II” and gave a 30-minute paper “A Baroque Tack on Joyce’s Finnegans Wake”, XXth International James Joyce Symposium, Budapest University (Eötvös Loránd Univ., ELTE), Budapest-Szombathely, Hungary, 11–17/6 2006.
  16. 29 August 2006: Gave a paper “James, Nancy and the Concept of Freedom” for a panel “James, Post-structurality and After”, ESSE-8, Senate House, London, UK, 29/8–2/9 2006; other participants: prof. Annick Duperray (Convener, Provence), prof. Cornelius Crowley (Paris 10) and prof. Adrian Harding (Provence).
  17. 13 October 2006: Gave a talk “Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord and the Realization of Politicized Spectrality”, 10th Constance- Prague-Workshop: Spirits, Spectres, Ghosts, 13–14/10 2006, Universität Konstanz, Germany.
  18. 5 June 2007: Gave a paper “Layering Dizziness; or, The Cinema of Buster Keaton” for the 31st annual conference of the International Association of Philosophy and Literature, University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus, 4–9/6 2007.
  19. 26 June 2007: Gave a paper on “Gothic Components and Gothic Globality of Balzac’s Early-Style Le Centenaire; ou, Les Deux Béringhelds [The Centenarian; or, The Two Beringhelds, trans. 2005]” for the International Gothic Association “Gothic N.E.W.S.” conference at Université de Provence (Aix-Marseille I), France, 25–29/VI 2007.
  20. 19 October 2007: Gave a paper “Niklas Luhmann & Forms of the Baroque Modern; or: Structure, System, & Contingency” for ‘Section 1: Theories of Structure and their Transformations’ on 18/19 x 2007 for a conference on “Prague School and Theories of Structure”; Charles University-Prague, 18–21/10 2007.
  21. 25 October 2007: Gave a paper “The Social and the Negative: >F.W. Murnau’s Der Letzte Mann (The Last Laugh, 1924) and Walter Benjamin’s ‘Angelus Novus’”; “The Landscape without Qualities: Literature and Central Europe” at the Department of Czech and Comparative Literature, Faculty of Arts, Charles University-Prague, & at the Austrian Cultural Forum, 23–25/10 2007. Proceedings to be published in book form in honor of prof. Peter Demetz’s (Yale University) 85th Birthday.
  22. 17 June 2008: Gave a paper “An Unconscious & Ultra-Modern Philosophical Baroque; or, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1922), & the Energies of Cosmic Systems of Bataille’s Atheology & General Economy” for a panel chaired by prof. Barry McCrae (Yale University) on the subject of ‘Joyce and Proust’ at the 21st International James Joyce Symposium, 15–20/VI 2008, Tours, France.
  23. 12 July 2008: Gave a paper “The Unconscious Monad of James, of Benjamin, & of Blanchot’s The Book to Come (Le livre à venir, 1959)” for a conference on the topic area of ‘Jamesian Strands’ at the Third International Conference of the Henry James Society at Salve Regina University, Newport, Rhode Island, 9–13/7 2008.
  24. 9 September 2008: Gave a paper “Forms and Structures of Silence and Movement of Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1974)” for a conference on the subject of ‘America in Motion’ at the Olomouc International Symposium of American Studies, 7–10/9 2008, Palacký University, Olomouc, Czechia.
  25. 10 October 2008: Gave a paper “Catastrophe, Allegory & & Philosophical Baroque: Benjamin/Lacan & Joyce/Pynchon at the 12th Constance-Prague-Workshop: Culture and Crisis, Universität Konstanz, Germany, 10–11/10 2008.
  26. 3 April 2009 gave a paper “The Philosophical Baroque; or, James, Benjamin, Blanchot, & the Fold” for the First Annual Conference of the European Henry James Society. The American University of Paris, 3–5 April 2009. “Henry James’s Europe: Cultural reappropriations, transtextual relations”.
  27. 3 June 2009 gave a paper “Cinema & Philosophy: Time & Memory in Alain Resnais’s Muriel (1965) & Providence (1976)” for the 33rd annual conference of the International Association of Philosophy and Literature, University of West Brunel, London, UK, 2–7/6 2009.
  28. 13 November 2009: Gave a paper “The Dialectics of Existence & Creation; The Real of Invisible Man (1952)” at the 16th Olomouc Colloquium of American Studies, Black Odyssey Continued, 12–14 xi 2009, Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic
  29. 4 February 2010: Gave a paper “The Dramatism and Folds of Desire’s Discontents: Welles, Lacan, and Shakespeare’s King Lear” at a panel I convened on “Cinema and Critical Theory” at the 9th Conference of English and American Studies, “Diversification and its Discontents: Dynamics of the Discipline”, Masaryk University, 2–4 February, Brno, Czechia.
  30. 16 June 2010 gave a paper “Notes Toward a More Pure General Community & Dramatic General Economy of Derrida’s Glas (1974) & of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939)” at a panel I convened on “Post-structuralist Peregrinations” at the International James Joyce Symposium, Charles University, 13–19 June 2010, Prague, Czechia.
  31.  24 September 2010 gave a paper “The Unconscious, Athletic Identity, & a Whole Galaxy on Stage; or, the 1984 French Open Final, McEnroe vs. Lendl” for a panel on “The Self, Action & the Unconscious” at a Colloquium at Metropolitan University-Prague on “Nations, Cultures, Individuals & Their Limits”, 24–25 September 2010, Prague, Czechia.
  32. 22 October 2010 gave a paper “Forms of Community, Freedom & Duplicity; or, Double Registers in James’s The Ambassadors (1903)” for a panel on ‘Duplicity and Double Registers”, 21–23 October 2010, The second international conference of the European Society of Jamesian Studies, “Henry James and the Poetics of Duplicity”, The American University of Paris, Paris, France.
  33. 5 November 2011 gave a paper “A Rhetoric of Jacques Lacan & of Niklas Luhmann” for the 14th Prague-Constance Workshop on “Violence and Representation”, Universität Konstanz, 4–5 November 2011, Konstanz, Germany.
  34. 14 May 2012 gave a paper “The Dance Between Existence Creation & the Commons in Dante’s Commedia, Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground & Ellison’s Invisible Man” for a conference on “Reading a Symptom: Literary and Psychoanalytical Perspectives”, 14 May 2012, University of Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv, Israel.
  35. 1 June 2012 gave a paper “Expression, the Fold, & the Spinozan Opportunity of Existence qua Deleuze” for a special symposium “Deleuzian Futures: expression, indifference, event, fold”, William Watkin, chair (other panel members included Dany Nobus and Sean Bowden) at the 36th IAPL Conference “Archaeologies of the Future: tracing memories / imagining spaces”, 28 May–3 June, Tallinn, Estonia. Plenary speakers included the philosopher Jacques Rancière, the composer Erkki-Sven Tüür and the novelist Sofi Oksanen.
  36.  10 November 2012 gave a paper “A Fully Fledged Reality: Jimmy Connors vs. Ivan Lendl in the Men’s Singles Final of the 1982 & 1983 US Tennis Opens” for the 16th Prague-Constance workshop on “Violence and Representation”, 9–10/11/12, Charles University, Prague, Czechia.
  37. 22 June 2014 gave a paper on “An Aesthetic & Ethical Revolutionary on the U.S.-American Road: Theodor W. Adorno in Los Angeles & in New York, 1938-53″ for an international conference on “A View from Elsewhere”, 20–22 June 2014, Palacký University, Olomouc, Czechia.
  38. 21 November 2014 gave a paper “Money & Power; or, Radical Materialism in James & Balzac” for a conference on ‘Money, Power, Representations in the Americas and in Europe’, Paris Ouest Nanterre 20–22 November 2014.
  39. 7 February 2015 gave a paper “Spirits of the Self & of the Family Universe in Selected U.S. Literature” for the ’10th Brno Conference of English, American and Canadian Studies’, ‘Creating, Shaping, Signifying’, Masaryk University, Brno, Czechia, 5–7 February 2015.
  40. 20 October 2016 gave a paper “The Anti-Modern James, Balzac, and Barthes” for a panel on “French Connections II: Historical Dialectics” at the third international conference of the European Society of Jamesian Studies, for a panel on “Historical Dialectics II”, “Reading James in the Twenty-First Century: Heritage and Transmission”, The American University of Paris, 20–22 x 2016, Paris, France.
  41. 1 April 2017 gave a paper “Hegel, Shakespeare, and Forms of the World Spirit” for a one-day symposium on “Hegel and Shakespeare”, 1 April 2017 that took place as part of the Kingston Shakespeare Seminar (KiSS), Kingston University, London. This event was held at the Garrick’s Temple, Hampton. The other speakers for the event were Jennifer Bates, Ewan Fernie, Simon Haines, Paul Kottman and Joe Moshenska. The event was followed with a performance of Chamber Music, “The Music of the World Spirit” from the Abel Quartet in the Temple (Haydn, Mozart, Devienne). Hampton, London, UK.
  42. 13 April 2018. Gave a paper as an Invited Speaker on “Languages and forms of capital in Balzac and James” for a conference on “Balzac et L’Angleterre” / “Balzac and England” at the Maison Française d’Oxford, 12–14 April 2018. Invited by dr. Tim Farrant (Fellow and Reader in French) Pembroke College, University of Oxford. *See also under Invited Guest Lectures.
  43. 12 iv 2023. Gave a paper, “On the Artwork as Transitional Event” for a one-day workshop/conference on, “Art as an event in post-heideggerian discourse”, Keynote speaker, Claude Romano, Paris-Sorbonne, Institute of Philosophy, SAS, v.v.i., 12 iv 2023, Bratislava, Slovakia.

CONFERENCE/WORKSHOP PARTICIPANT: 

I. As a graduate student at Oxford attended two conferences in London one on Intertextuality (Michael Riffaterre, Columbia University gave one keynote address and Ann Jefferson, University of Oxford, gave another talk) and another on Michel Foucault.

II. Discussant for the topic, “Uses of Periodization: Beyond Positivist History, ‘Structure of Development’ and ‘Horizon of Expectation'”, at a Meeting of the European Network for Reception Studies, Charles University; keynote lecture “History without Periods: Dilemma or Deliverance?”, prof. Randolph Starn, History Department, University of California-Berkeley, Prague, Czech Republic, 7/10 2006.

III. Attended “The European Colloquia: The New Equilibria in the World Economy” 30/11 2006, Žofín Palace, Prague, Czech Republic: speakers include James Heckman (Nobel Laureate in Economics, 2000), Joseph E. Stiglitz, Columbia University (Nobel Laureate in Economics, 2001, Advisory Committee at CERGE-EI-Prague) and Edward C. Prescott (Nobel Laureate in Economics 2004).

IV. Respondent for a two-day long seminar on “Constructing Cultural Identity: Discourse, Performance, Fiction” 5–6 February at the  9th Conference of English and American Studies, “Diversification and its Discontents: Dynamics of the Discipline”, Masaryk University, Brno, Czechia. 4–6 February 2010.

V. Delegate at the international conference on “Lacan Today”, 3–5 May 2010, University College, London, UK.

VI. Participant at the UNYP 2010 Symposium Meeting Crisis with Wisdom: Charting our way forward in politics, business, finance, law & education, 8 October 2010 at the New York University in Prague Center. Prague, Czechia.

VII. Participant and gave a short presentation on “The Basic Constellation of American Cultural-Studies at Charles University in Prague” at American Studies Day at the American Cultural Center of the U.S. Embassy in Prague, 28 ii 2014, Prague, Czechia.

VIII–XII. Participant at American Studies Day at the American Cultural Center of the U.S. Embassy, 13 iii 2015, 4 iii 2016, 10 iii 2017, 16 iii 2018, and 15 iii 2019, Prague, Czechia.

XIII. Participant at an International Conference on “Dialectics Returns”, 12 September 2019, Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czechia. Speakers include Agon Hamza (Institute of Philosophy, Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts) and Nick Nesbitt (Princeton University).

XIV. Participant at an International Conference on “Hellenism, Early Judaism and Early Christianity: Transmission and Transformation of Ideas”, 12–13 ix 2019, Vila Lanna, V Sadech 1, Prague 6, Prague, Czechia. Keynote speakers: Daniel Boyarin (University of California, Berkeley), Anders Klostergaard Petersen (University of Aarhus) and Ilaria L.E. Ramelli (University of Oxford).

XV. 30 x 2019: Participant and respondent at an event from Meet Factory / Display, Prague, Czechia. Invitation accepted to take part in the public screening and informal post-film discussion / debate with Prof Nick Nesbitt, Princeton University (USA) on the Film / Project entitled Poems from Which We Have Learned, dir. Ivana Momčilović  (with the work of Jacques Rancière as a source of inspiration for the film). Introduced by John Hill and invited by Ivana Momčilović (thanks to Jacques Rancière’s shout-out).

XVI. Participant at an International Conference on “Phenomenology and Personal Identity II”, 8–9 xi 2019, Venues Jana Palacha 2 and AKC Husova 4A, Organized by Charles University, Prague, Faculty of Arts. Speakers include Steven Crowell, Rice University, USA and Dan Zhahavi, University of Copenhagen, Denmark / University of Oxford, UK.

XVII. Participant at an International Conference on Plato’s Gorgias, XIIth Symposium Platonicum Pragense, 13–15 xi 2019, Vila Lanna, V Sadech 1, Prague, Czechia. Speakers include Frisbee Sheffield (University of Cambridge).

XVIII. Participant at an International Conference on “Machiavelli and Contemporary Politics”, 15–16 xi 2019, Prague, Czechia. Speakers include Jeffrey Green (University of Pennsylvania), Lawrence Hamilton (University of Cambridge) and Yves Winter (McGill University).

XVIV. Participant at an International Colloquium/Colloque international on “Perspectives proustienns/Proustian Perspectives”, 23–24 iii 2023, Prague, Czechia. Speakers include Antoine Compagnon (de l’Académie française, est professeur émérite de Littérature française moderne et contemporaine au Collège de France et Blanche W. Knopf Professor of French and Comparative Literature, Columbia University).

SYMPOSIA PANELS:

  1. Participated on a “Teaching Joyce” panel, XVIth International James Joyce Symposium, Rome, Italy, 14–20/6 1998. Venue: University of Rome.

PANELS CONVENED/MODERATED ONLY: 

  1. 2 February 2005: “Poetry I”, 8th Brno Conference of English,American and Canadian Studies, 2-4/2 2005, Masaryk University, Brno, Czechia.
  2. 18 June 2010: “Joyce with Heidegger”, International James Joyce Symposium, Charles University, Prague, Czechia.
  3. 21 June 2014, panel on literature with four speakers chaired at the conference “A View from Elsewhere”, 20–22 vi 2014, Palacký University, Olomouc, Czechia.
  4. 7 February 2015, “C19 & early C20 Literature: Whitman, Hawthorne, James”, 10th Brno Conference of English, American and Canadian Studies, ‘Creating, Shaping, Signifying’, 5–7 ii 2015, Masaryk University, Brno, Czechia.

    LANGUAGES:

  1. Reading and speaking knowledge of French.
  2. Reading knowledge of German.
  3. Working knowledge of Italian.
  4. Reading knowledge of Spanish.
  5. Working knowledge of Latin.
  6. Basic working/beginner’s knowledge of Czech.

EXTERNAL/READER’S REVIEWS:

I. External review submitted for a book proposal for Bloomsbury Publishing Company (US/UK) for a Commissioning Editor in Philosophy. May 2014.

II. External review submitted for a book published at Palacký University, Olomouc, Czechia. February 2015. America in Foreign Media. Ed. by Michal Peprník & Matthew Sweney. ISBN 978–80–244–4362–1, 228 pp.

III. External blind peer review submitted on an article publication for Brno Studies in English, Eds. Jan Chovanec and Filip Krajník. May 2016.

IV. Reader’s Review submitted for a book publication on The Metaphor Will Hold: Emerson, Nominalism, Fictionalism, Nihilism, and Matinal Modernism by David L. Robbins for the Karolinum of Charles University Press (Prague, Czechia). March 2020.

V. Tenure Review report submitted to the English Department, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, USA. October 2020.

VI. Reader’s Review submitted for an article to the journal MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States (Oxford University Press). October 2021.

VII. External review submitted for a European Research Council Consolidator Grant 2022 for the panel on Culture and Cultural Production (SH5). This ERC call supports first-class scientists with grants valued at up to 3.0 million Euros only. October 2022.

VIII. Reader’s Review submitted for an article to the Routledge Taylor & Francis (London/New York) journal, Life Writing. November 2022.

IX. Reader’s Review submitted for a book manuscript to Vernon Press (Wilmington, Delaware, USA / Malaga, Spain / Sevilla, Spain). December 2022.

X. Reader’s Review submitted for a book manuscript to Vernon Press (Wilmington, Delaware, USA / Malaga, Spain / Sevilla, Spain). September 2023.

XI. Reader’s Review submitted for an article to PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, published by Cambridge University Press (New York). February 2024.

PROFESSIONAL ASSOCIATIONS:

  1. On the reading committee of E-REA (Univ. de Provence, Aix-Marseille I), Autumn 2005-present.
  2. Czech Association for the Study of English (CZASE), Czech Republic and the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE), 2006–present.
  3. Pynchon Notes, 1998–present.
  4. Russian Society of American Culture Studies, 2002.
  5. Modern Language Association of America, 1996–present. Dues paid through 2024.
  6. Leibniz Society of North America, 2003–present. Dues paid through 2024.
  7. International James Joyce Foundation, 1998–2012.
  8. International Association of Philosophy and Literature, 2002, 2004–09.
  9. European Henry James Society, 2009–present.
  10. Henry James Society, 1996–2009.
  11. On the editorial board of a new scholarly and peer reviewed journal. Editor: Arbeit, Marcel, inter alia. The Moravian Journal of Literature and Film published by Filosofická Fakulta, Palacký University, Olomouc.
  12. Czech and Slovak Association for American Studies (CSAA), Czechia and European Association for American Studies (EAAS), 2014–present.

BIOGRAPHICAL/CRITICAL SOURCES:

  1. For more information use a search tool, GOOGLE or YAHOO for example and enter “Erik Roraback”.
  2. Multiple Editions of Marquis Who’s Who in the World.
  3. Web site in construction, https://www.erikroraback.com

SELECT EXTRA-CURRICULAR ACTIVITIES:

  1. Pomona College Student-Faculty Interaction Committee, Spring 1987.
  2. United States Tennis Association, 1985–1990, 1999–2001, 2003–2004, 2012–present; have played in USTA-sanctioned tournaments including the Washington State Open several times from 1985 more recently entered and played: a) the 122nd Washington State Open and Seniors Player tournament at the Seattle Tennis Club on the shores of Lake Washington, 31 July–5 August 2012 b) the 123rd Washington State Open and Seniors Player tournament at the Seattle Tennis Club, 30 July–4 August 2013 c) the 124th Washington State Open and Seniors Player Tournament at the same venue from 29 July–3 August 2014 and d) the 125th Washington State Open and Seniors Player Tournament at the same club from 28 July–2 August 2015 e) the 126th Washington State Open and Seniors Player Tournament at the same venue from 2–7 August 2016 f) the 127th Washington State Open and Seniors Player Tournament same venue 1–6 August 2017 g) the 128th Washington State Open and Seniors Player Tournament at the same venue from 31 July–5 August 2018; made it to the quarterfinals for men’s singles of my age division in 2012 and to the round of 16 for men’s singles of my age division in 2013, in 2014 and in 2017; in 2001, at the same tournament (the 111th edition), I played and was leading early on in a men’s singles match against the former world number 31 and 1987 Australian Open men’s singles quarterfinalist with career victories over the US tennis players Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras, Kelly Evernden from New Zealand (he also was world number 19 in doubles with quarterfinal appearances in that event at the Australian Open in 1988, at Wimbledon in 1988 and in 1991, and at the US Open in 1992). Recently played in the 130th Washington State Open and Seniors Player Tournament at the same venue from 1–7 August 2022, the 131st Washington State Open and Seniors Player Tournament at the Seattle Tennis Club from 1–6 August 2023, and the 132nd edition of the event at the Seattle Tennis Club from 30 July–4 August 2024, where I lost in the round of 16 in my division. Plan to play the 133rd edition of the same foregoing event and venue from 28 July–2 August 2025.
  3. Oxford University Architectural Society, Fall 1988, 1991–92.
  4. Oxford University Penguins and Linacre College, Oxford tennis teams, 1991–92 (University team + Linacre captain and Linacre #1 singles player), 1994 (University team + Linacre captain and Linacre #1 singles player; #3 singles player for Oxford Varsity Match against the University of Cambridge in which Oxford won 17–4), 1995-96 (University team + Linacre co-captain and Linacre #1 singles player), 1996–97 (University team + Linacre captain and Linacre #1 singles player).

TEACHER-SCHOLAR CREDENTIALS:

  1. Dossier with transcripts, certificates and recommendations is available from The College Secretary, Linacre College, Oxford OX1 3JA, UK.


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