Office: HMNSS 2304 |
DAVID DANOW
Professor Danow’s scholarly interests include Russian nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, comparative literature, poetics and theory of literature, the carnivalesque, literary semiotics and the semiotics of culture. Among various others, he teaches several courses on both the undergraduate and graduate levels that begin with Homer and proceed through the twentieth century. Professor Danow has published five books and nearly sixty articles. His first two books, published in the same year, are devoted to the great nineteenth-century Russian writer, F.M. Dostoevsky (The Dialogic Sign: Essays on the Major Novels of Dostoevsky, 1991), and to the twentieth-century philosopher of dialogue, Mikhail Bakhtin (The Thought of Mikhail Bakhtin: From Word to Culture, 1991). In 1995, he published The Spirit of Carnival: Magical Realism and the Grotesque, which is inspired by Bakhtin and by his own linked understandings of Latin American magical realist works as well as by Holocaust literature. This book was followed, in 1997, by his Models of Narrative: Theory and Practice, also a work of comparative literature, which expounds the need for models and model making in literary study, and concentrates on the seminal matters of temporal, spatial, and dialogic relations. His perhaps most ambitious book to date, Transformation as the Principle of Literary Creation from the Homeric Epic to the Joycean Novel, appeared in 2004, with chapters devoted to studies of transformation in Homer, Virgil, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Cervantes, Diderot, Fielding, Tolstoy, and Joyce. In addition, Professor Danow’s published articles and contributions to books represent extensive studies of some three dozen major writers and literary theorists, including, among others, Isabel Allende, Isaac Babel, Jorge Luis Borges, Mikhail Bulgakov, Joseph Conrad, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Yuri Lotman, Gabriel García Márquez, Jan Mukarovsky, Flannery O’Connor, Boris Pasternak, Juan Rulfo, Leo Tolstoy, and Emile Zola. When not teaching or pursuing his research interests, he travels the world, in the past decade throughout Southeast Asia, China, and India. Because he believes that to live is to see and the world is a beautiful place. |
