Dr Neil Stewart

April 2014 - March 2015
Mail: n.stewart(at)uni-bonn(dot)de

Neil Stewart, a fellow at the Imre Kertész Kolleg from April 2014 to March 2015, has been a lecturer at the Department of German, Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Bonn since 2009. Before that, he worked as Assistant Professor at the Slavic Department in Bonn (2004-2009) and was a fellow at the Collegium Budapest in 2007. He completed his PhD. as member of a Graduiertenkolleg (Graduates' Workshop) on Classicism and Romanticism at the University of Giessen between 2000 and 2003, having previously studied Slavic Literatures and Languages, Comparative Literature and Eastern European History at the University of Bonn.

Research project at the Kolleg

The research project examines the monthly Moderní revue pro literaturu, umění a život [Modern Review for Literature, Art, and Life] that was published in Prague between 1894 and 1925 by the bank clerk Arnošt Procházka with the help of the post office worker Jiří Karásek. Czech literary historiography has traditionally tended to regard this journal as the mouthpiece of Decadence and assigned it no more than a marginal position on the lunatic fringe of Prague Modernism, while focusing its attention predominantly on texts and authors from the Realist mainstream. The present study, in contrast, examines the Review as a modern institution, analysing the major role it played in the internationalisation of Bohemian culture at the turn of the century. The journal did not, however, remain "modern" in the long run: during the 1920s, it defended utterly anachronistic aesthetic positions and politically ended up as an organ of the extreme Right with pronounced anti-German and anti-Semitic tendencies - a development that in many ways exemplifies the precarious nature of Modernism on the eve of Fascism and thus deserves particularly close scrutiny.

Main areas of research

Literary Modernisms in East Central Europe
Literary theory
Comparative literature

Positions and Memberships

Review Editor of the journal "arcadia"
Member of the Modern Language Association (MLA)
Member of the German Comparative Literature Association (DGAVL)
Member of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA)
Member of the German Association of Slavists

Monographs

"Vstan' i vspominaj". Auferstehung als Collage in Venedikt Erofeevs Moskva-Petuški, Frankfurt (M.) etc.: Peter Lang 1999.

"Glimmerings of Wit". Laurence Sterne und die russische Literatur von 1790 bis 1840, Heidelberg: C. Winter 2005.

Edited Volumes

(with Jochen Fritz), Das schlechte Gewissen der Moderne. Kulturtheorie und Gewaltdarstellung in Literatur und Film nach 1968, Cologne, Weimar, Vienna: Böhlau 2006.

Articles

"Karneval und Konzeptualismus. Zur russischen Rezeption Michail Bachtins in den achtziger und neunziger Jahren", in: KultuRRevolution, 2, 2004, pp. 34-43.

"Ästhetik des Widerlichen und Folterkammer des Wortes. Die russische Konzeptkunst von Vladimir Sorokin", in: Jochen Fritz and Neil Stewart (eds.), Das schlechte Gewissen der Moderne. Kulturtheorie und Gewaltdarstellung in Literatur und Film nach 1968, Cologne, Weimar, Vienna: Böhlau 2006, pp. 231-271.

"'We did not want an émigré journal'. Pavel Tigrid and Svědectví", in: John Neubauer and Zsuzsanna Török (eds.), The Exile and Return of Writers from East-Central Europe. A Compendium, Berlin, New York: De Gruyter 2009, pp. 242-275.

"Die Pariser Weltausstellung von 1900 in slavischen Kulturzeitschriften", in: Heinrich Detering and Ulrich Mölk (eds.), Perspektiven der Modernisierung. Die Pariser Weltausstellung, die Arbeiterbewegung, das koloniale China in europäischen und amerikanischen Kulturzeitschriften um 1900, Berlin, New York: De Gruyter 2010, pp. 59-80.

"Komparatistik der Metamorphose. Ovid, Kafka, Cronenberg", in: Zeitschrift für deutschsprachige Literatur und Kultur, 22, 2013, pp. 337-371.

"Pushkin 1880. Fedor Dostoevsky Voices the Russian Self-image", in: Joep Leerssen and Ann Rigney (eds.), Commemorating Writers in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Nation-building and Centenary Fever, Basingstoke etc.: Palgrave MacMillan 2014.

Reviews

Wolfgang Stephan Kissel, Der Kult des toten Dichters und die russische Moderne. Puškin-Blok-Majakovskij, Cologne, Weimar, Vienna: Böhlau 2004, in: Zeitschrift für slavische Philologie, 2, 2004, pp. 449-456.

Antonella d'Amelia (ed.), Pietroburgo, capitale della cultura russa / Peterburg, stolica russkoj kul'tury, 2 vols., Salerno: Europa Orientalis 2004, in: Zeitschrift für slavische Philologie, 2, 2004, pp. 443-449.

Irina Wutsdorff, Bachtin und der Prager Strukturalismus. Modelle poetischer Offenheit am Beispiel der tschechischen Avantgarde, Munich: Fink 2006, in: Zeitschrift für slavische Philologie, 2, 2005/6, pp. 433-438.

Robert Bird, The Russian Prospero. The Creative Universe of Viacheslav Ivanov, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 2006, in: Zeitschrift für slavische Philologie, 1, 2007/8, pp. 203-206.

Magdalena Marszałek und Sylvia Sasse (eds.), Geopoetiken. Geographische Entwürfe in den mittel- und osteuropäischen Literaturen, Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos 2010, in: Arcadia, 2, 2010, pp. 490-493.