I am interested in a wide variety of topics, such as Czech poetry, Central European Jewish literature, issues of exile, gender, race, nationalism, prejudice and emotive signs. I am an exile poet and scholar from Czechoslovakia. I have published a number of books of existential and metaphysical poetry in Czech and English, as well as two books on linguistic and literary semiotics. 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 like, Mácha, Kundera, Ne(mcová, C(apek, Hašek, Vaculík, Hrabal, Havel and others. Between the years 1976 and 1992, 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. I am currently working on an anthology of 20th century Czech poetry in English. At IU, I direct the Czech Program and I teach classes on Czech language, Czech and Comparative Literature and on the Theory of Prague School of Linguistics and Poetics.
Areas of Interest
- Semiotics
- Emotive Language
- Czech and Central European Literature
- Poetry
- Exile
