Borns Jewish Studies Program

I am interested in a wide variety of topics, such as Czech poetry, Central European Jewish literature, Czech popular culture, issues of exile, gender, race, nationalism, prejudice and emotive signs. I am an exile poet and scholar from Czechoslovakia. I have published twelve books of existential and metaphysical poetry in Czech and English, two books on linguistic and literary semiotics (1987, 1997), a large bilingual Anthology of 20th-Century Czech Poetry (with Clarice Cloutier, 2008) and a book of essays on the typology of exile Forms of Exile in Jewish Literature and Thought (Twentieth-Century Central Europe and Migration to America) 2021 (available also in Open Research Library and in Czech translation 2022).  In the area of semiotics, my work concerns emotive language, the difference between emotivity, expressivity, intensification and value; typology of functions of repetition; degrees of emphasis in Russian, Czech and Spanish syntax; semiotic interpretation of diminutives, augmentatives and other derived nouns in Russian and Czech, including their word-formational, lexicological and contextual aspects.

My literary semiotic work focuses on emotive signs in poetry, exile, issues of sexual relationships, responsibility, guilt, innocence, racism, nationalism, euro-centrism, relationship between private and public sphere, escape and vision, death and other emotive and value issues and their expression in the works of major Czech writers. Between the years 1976 and 1992, my western publications appeared under the name "Volek". Since 2000, I am also active as a visual artist and a director of multimedia performances of poetry. At IU, I have served as Director of the Czech Program for 30 years, organizing an annual Czech film series, and teaching classes on Czech language, Czech and Comparative literature, Theory of the Prague School of Linguistics and Poetics, as well as Central European Jewish Writers and Exile. My poetry has been translated into fourteen languages. I have received a number of cultural and literary awards and participated in a number of international poetry festivals around the world. Books of my selected poems have been published in the USA (1993), Czech Republic (1995, 2011, 2019: German bilingual edition), Bulgaria (2013), Ukraine (2014, 2019), Russia (2015, 2020), Slovakia (2016) and Argentina (2020). Recently, a book of stories is in press in Prague and books of selected poems are in preparation in Croatia and Belgium.