Jonathan Bolton

Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures

Director of Undergraduate Studies

Barker Center 319 - 496-0623 -- jbolton[at]fas.harvard.edu

Education: B.A. 1990 Harvard University, M.A. 1995 University of Texas at Austin, Ph.D. 2001 University of Michigan.

Interests: Czech literature, history, and culture in a Central European context; Jews in Central European literature; language, narrative form, and political power in first-person writing under Communism; literary theory and theory of literary history.

Current Courses:

Fall:
• Slavic 197 (Rebels With A Cause: Dissident Culture in Central Europe: Conference Course)

Spring:
• Slavic 195 (Myths of Central Europe after World War II: Conference Course)
• Foreign Cultures 92 (From the Prague Spring to the Velvet Revolution: Czech Culture under Communism)

Selected Publications:
• In the Puppet Gardens: Selected Poems 1963-2005, by Ivan Wernisch. Edited and translated by Jonathan Bolton. I selected and translated about 100 poems from the course of Wernisch’s whole career, and wrote an afterword, “The Skeptical Imagination of Ivan Wernisch” (8500 words).
• Nový historismus / New Historicism (Brno: Host, 2007), an anthology of essays on American New Historicism, which I edited for Teoretická knihovna, a Czech series on literary theory.
• “Czech Literature.” Article on Czech-Jewish literature to be published in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe (forthcoming in February 2008). I also wrote the Encyclopedia’s author entries on František Gellner, Egon Hostovský, Ivan Olbracht, Jiří Orten, Roman Jakobson, Jiří Weil, Richard Weiner, and Julius Zeyer.
• “Ruins of a Republic: Czech Modernism After Munich, 1938-1939.” In Ruins of Modernity, eds. Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle (forthcoming from Duke University Press in 2008-09).
• “Writing in a Polluted Semiosphere: Everyday Life in Lotman, Foucault, and de Certeau.” In Lotman and Cultural Studies: Encounters and Extensions. Ed. Andreas Schnle (University of Wisconsin Press, 2006): 322-344.
• “Promĕny bytu: Metamorfózy soukromého prostoru v české literatuře. [What Lies in Wait Behind the Wall: Metamorphoses of Domestic Space in Czech Literature].” Svĕt literatury (Prague), October 2006.
• “Reading Michal Ajvaz.” Context 17 (available on-line here)
• “Mourning Becomes the Nation: The Funeral of Tomáš Masaryk in 1937.” Bohemia 45.1 (2004): 115-131.
• “Josef Bor.” Holocaust Novelists (Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 299). Ed. Efraim Sicher. (Gale, 2004). 58-64.
• “Reading Patrik Ouředník.” Context 15 (spring 2004). (Available on-line here.)
• “Elegie veřejné a soukromé: Melancholie u Seiferta, Ortena a Blatného [Public and Private Elegies: Melancholy in Seifert, Orten, and Blatný].” Česká literatura (Prague), 49.2 (2001): 128-143
• “Stret pameti a dejin [Encounters of Memory and History (on Central European memoirs)].” Host (Brno), XVI.3 ( March 2000): 46-51.
• “Volný verš v Seifertovĕ poezii dvacátých let [Free Verse in Seifert’s Poetry of the 1920’s].” Šnikerikyk (Host, 1998). 72-81.

Reviews:
• Review of Scott Spector’s Prague Territories
• Review of Derek Sayer’s The Coasts of Bohemia

Translations:
• “Two” and “Last Century,” poems by the Moravian poet Petr Hruška, Circumference 5 (Fall 2006).
• “The Story of King Candaules,” by Jiří Kratochvil. Daylight in Nightclub Inferno: Czech Fiction from the Post-Kundera Generation (Catbird Press, 1997).
• “Death Was Waiting for Us Elsewhere,” by Ivan Wernisch, Circumference 3, available on-line here.

Work in Progress:
• Versions of the Everyday: Power, Language, and Narrative in Czech and Russian Literature of the 1970s (book)
• Prague Between Two Empires: Literary Culture in Interwar Czechoslovakia (book)
• “The Case of the Missing Poet: Anti-Semitism and the Beginnings of Czech-Jewish Literature” (article)