Christopher Koy
University of South Bohemia, Department of English, Faculty Member
- American Literature, African American Literature, Jewish American Literature, Intertextuality And Plagiarism, Franz Kafka, Philip Roth, and 8 moreRace and Ethnicity, Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, Canadian Literature, Drug Mules, Irish Literature, Kosovo, Ukrainian Studies, and Animal Studiesedit
- Almae materes: B.A., Beloit College - Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg (junior yr abroad) M.A., University of ... moreAlmae materes:
B.A., Beloit College
- Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg (junior yr abroad)
M.A., University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign
Ph.D., Charles University, Prague
I studied German, philosophy and English at Beloit College, University of Illinois and Charles University (in Prague). I teach 19th and 20th century literature of the United States as well as English conversation and composition to future Czech teachers of English.
In 2007 Kamila Vránková and I co-edited the proceedings of a literature conference entitled "Dream, Imagination and Reality in Literature" held in České Budějovice in the previous year. The articles can be accessed here
https://www.pf.jcu.cz/structure/departments/kaj/o-katedre/publikacni-cinnost/sbaas2007/
(ORCID: 0000-0002-2299-198X)edit
Zora Neale Hurston's best-known novel, 'Their Eyes Were Watching God' (1937), has become a major part of the African American as well as the American literary canon, though it had not always received a large readership. As a trained... more
Zora Neale Hurston's best-known novel, 'Their Eyes Were Watching God' (1937), has become a major part of the African American as well as the American literary canon, though it had not always received a large readership. As a trained ethnologist (8.A., Columbia tJniversity, 1925), Hurston had conducted field work in the Southern states of the U.S. as well as in' the Bahamas, Jamaica and Haiti, and published in scholarly journals as well as one book of collected folklore 'Mules and Men' (1935) before 'Their Eyes Were Watching God' was written and published. This contribution attempts to show the impact and influence her cultural anthropology field work exerted on the novel.
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Patrick McCabe's novel The Butcher Boy (1992) has been critically examined from a very large number of perspectives for over a quarter of a century. Instead of a comprehensive look at the entire Irish novel or an analysis of the... more
Patrick McCabe's novel The Butcher Boy (1992) has been critically examined from a very large number of perspectives for over a quarter of a century. Instead of a comprehensive look at the entire Irish novel or an analysis of the compelling language, psychology, or its historical context, this article will narrowly focus on Derrida's look at the ethics of gifts and exchanges and apply his notions to the nature and eventual deterioration of the close relationship between Francis (Francie) Brady and his childhood friend Joe Purcell as a contribution to an understanding about the homicidal behavior of the narrator Francis Brady.
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An intertextual study of Philip Roth's novel Sabbath's Theater and William Shakespeare's play King Lear.
Research Interests: American Literature, Jewish American Literature, Shakespeare, Suicide, Intertextuality, and 12 moreTwentieth Century Literature, Shakespearean Drama, American Novel, Theatre, Philip Roth, Madness and Literature, Insanity, King Lear, New York City, Sexual Deviant Behaviour, Betrayal, and Alcoholics Anonymous
Research Interests: Kosovo, Mark Twain, Conflict Management, Edward Morgan Forster, Serbian Politics, and 7 morePost-Conflict Reconciliation, Language Teachers as Agents of Social Change in the Global Classroom, Kosovo Independence, Serbia-Kosovo Relations, Kosovo War, Kosovo Serbs, and Breakup of the former Yugoslavia
In this article I trace numerous similarities in plot, setting, characters and motif in two novels. The approaching European war and holocaust in Israel Joshua Singer's novel The Family Carnovsky and the brutality of the Vietnam War of... more
In this article I trace numerous similarities in plot, setting, characters and motif in two novels. The approaching European war and holocaust in Israel Joshua Singer's novel The Family Carnovsky and the brutality of the Vietnam War of Roth's novel American Pastoral serve as the dreadful conditions which trigger the half-Jewish teenage child in each novel to revolt against the assimilating Jewish father figure and commit subversive acts against the U.S. government. I argue that the numerous similarities are not merely coincidental in this intertextual study, but that Roth has most likely updated Singer's depiction of a pre-WWII refuge family to America's next major crisis, namely the Vietnam era in the 1960s and 1970s.
Research Interests: American Literature, Jewish American Literature, Jainism, Yiddish Literature, Intertextuality, and 10 moreAmerican Novel, Suicide in Literature, Stuttering, Philip Roth, Ethnic and Racial Assimilation, Polish-German-Jewish Relations, Anti-Vietnam War Movement, 1961-1975, Vietnam War Literature, The Weathermen, and Nazism In Popular Culture
Research Interests: American Literature, Slavery, African American Literature, Victorian Literature, Intertextuality, and 9 moreAfrican American Studies, Critical Race Theory and Whiteness theory, Charles W. Chesnutt, Social Classes, W.M. Thackeray, Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture, Henry Louis Gates Jr, Snobbery, and Color Line
After the audacious study and profound interest in Latin literature by the autodidact Charles Chesnutt is presented, this contribution argues that, unlike scholarship up to now pointing to orally-passed African American folktales, many of... more
After the audacious study and profound interest in Latin literature by the autodidact Charles Chesnutt is presented, this contribution argues that, unlike scholarship up to now pointing to orally-passed African American folktales, many of Chesnutt's Conjure Woman stories are in fact variations of selected stories from Ovid's masterpiece Metamorphoses. This claim is underscored by citing specific incidences of conjuring of North Carolina slaves into animals and trees in Chesnutt's stories with the magic (Voodoo) transformations of characters in selections of Metamorphoses by Ovid. This use of Ovid by Chesnutt is argued to be an example of "signifying" as described in the theory of African American rhetoric by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in his study, The Signifying Monkey.
Research Interests: Black Studies Or African American Studies, Latin Literature, Nineteenth Century Studies, African American Literature, Intertextuality, and 15 moreOvid, African American Studies, Classical Reception Studies, Animals in Literature, Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, Charles W. Chesnutt, Slavery in the Americas, North Carolina, Animal Studies, Human Animal Metamorphosis in Literature, Representations of Slavery, Ovid Metamorphoses, African American Vernacular English, Voodoo, Reception of Ovid, and Myth Intertextuality
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This article, written in Czech, translates into English as "Mark Twain on Foreign Language Teaching and Learning." It shows both his humorous and serious writing about struggles he and his children encountered learning German, French and... more
This article, written in Czech, translates into English as "Mark Twain on Foreign Language Teaching and Learning." It shows both his humorous and serious writing about struggles he and his children encountered learning German, French and Italian. Occasionally he presents innovative ideas of learning, such as acquiring a language through play, which was ahead of his time.
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Conference talk on Ohiyesa or Charles Eastman on August 6, 2019 in Fairfield Bay, Arkansas
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Interview (in Czech) about Philip Roth and his literary connections to Franz Kafka and the Czech Republic. (Access this interview by clicking the "novinky.cz" link above)
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Belfast-born Canadian novelist Brian Moore (1921-1999) wrote novels which include a complex portrait of the Québécois. His first Canadian novel, The Luck of Ginger Coffey (1960), presents Montreal government officials, many of them... more
Belfast-born Canadian novelist Brian Moore (1921-1999) wrote novels which include a complex portrait of the Québécois. His first Canadian novel, The Luck of Ginger Coffey (1960), presents Montreal government officials, many of them French-speaking, as less sympathetic to the Irish immigrant protagonist. In later Canadian novels, however, Moore develops greater sympathy for the French-speaking minority. As a former Catholic within Protestant-dominated Northern Ireland, Moore includes insightful history of French-Canadian missionary work with distinct political and cultural overtones in both Black Robe (1985) and No Other Life (1997). He explores the national division of Canada during the period of violent upheaval surrounding the “October Crisis” in his neglected work, The Revolution Script (1971). Significantly, Moore’s sympathy for the Front de Libération du Québec (or FLQ) kidnappers comes at the expense of Pierre Trudeau, depicted as an actor. This contribution traces the development of Moore’s fictional portrait of the Québécois, a perspective which may be unique given both his immigrant “outsider” status and his early experiences as a minority in Belfast.
Research Interests: Canadian Studies, Canadian History, The Historical Novel, Québec History, Canadian Literature, and 17 moreIrish Diaspora, Twentieth Century Literature, Canadian Politics, Haitian History, Quebec, First Nations of Canada, Algonquian studies, Canadian and Quebec Politics, Études Québécoises, Iroquoian Studies, Political Kidnapping, Haitian Studies, Front de libération du Québec, October Crisis, Pierre Elliot Trudeau, Hurons, and Jean-Bertrand Aristide
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Review of Linda CHAVERS, "Violent Disruptions: American Imaginations of Racial Anxiety in William Faulkner and Richard Wright." New York: Peter Lang, 2019. 111+xxi pp.
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Review of a monograph by Pavlina Flajsarova entitled "Diaspora in the Fiction of Andrea Levy" (2014) published by Palacky University Press.
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Book review of a 2014 dissertation defended at the University of Mainz and published in 2015.
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A critical review of "Why Teach? In Defense of a Real Education." (It is a collection of essays by a distinguished professor of English at the University of Virginia.)
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A review of a memoir by the Irish-American writer Frank McCourt about his career as a New York City public school teacher from 1958-1987. (The review was published in 2007 in a Czech newsletter for English language teachers.)
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As a former student of Africanist Melville J. Herskovits in the Department of Anthropology at Northwestern University (Evanston, Illinois), Nobel Prize laureate Saul Bellow wrote Africans and African Americans extensively into many of his... more
As a former student of Africanist Melville J. Herskovits in the Department of Anthropology at Northwestern University (Evanston, Illinois), Nobel Prize laureate Saul Bellow wrote Africans and African Americans extensively into many of his novels, often with assumed anthropological principles. Some of his novels allude to the Jewish-black cultural relationship in the United States. His “African” novel, Henderson the Rain King (1959), has been perceived by black critics as both stereotyping blacks (Cecil Brown) and celebrating them (Floyd Salas). An episode in Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970) includes a controversial caricature of an African American exactly duplicating the Nazi depictions of Jews. Bellow’s more recent critique of black culture and its influence on American culture generally (published in essays and interviews) is also revealing. This paper intends to survey this subject matter as it is revealed in Bellow’s novels, essays and interviews. It will also consider the reception of his literature as it relates to this theme, including his final novel, Ravelstein (2000).
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The term “mulatto,” meaning an offspring of one black parent and one white parent, is a racist term etymologically derived from the Spanish word “mulatto” meaning a young mule. The mule, a sterile offspring of a mare and a male donkey, is... more
The term “mulatto,” meaning an offspring of one black parent and one white parent,
is a racist term etymologically derived from the Spanish word “mulatto” meaning a
young mule. The mule, a sterile offspring of a mare and a male donkey, is an
important metaphor in early African American literature and folklore.
Anthropologists collected African American tales with mules, and Charles Waddell
Chesnutt (1858-1932), inspired in part by this folklore, employed the mule as a
metaphor in his literary output to represent in part the subjugation of blacks.
is a racist term etymologically derived from the Spanish word “mulatto” meaning a
young mule. The mule, a sterile offspring of a mare and a male donkey, is an
important metaphor in early African American literature and folklore.
Anthropologists collected African American tales with mules, and Charles Waddell
Chesnutt (1858-1932), inspired in part by this folklore, employed the mule as a
metaphor in his literary output to represent in part the subjugation of blacks.
Research Interests: Black Studies Or African American Studies, Animal Studies, African American Literature, Metaphor, Animals in Literature, and 10 moreAnimals in Culture, Plantations, Animal Studies, Human Animal Metamorphosis in Literature, Philosophy and Sociology of Human/animal Relations, The House Behind the Cedars, Chesnutt, Mulatto, Slavery In Literature, The Conjurer's Revenge, and The Colonel's Dream
Research Interests: Slavery, Mark Twain, American Novel, Passing, Blackness, and 9 moreNineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture, Environmental Determinism, Representations of Slavery, Pudd'nhead Wilson, American Literary Realism, Naturalism, and Modernism, Self censorship, David Wilson, Mark Twain's Black Characters, and Patricide
Research Interests: American Literature, Jewish American Literature, Franz Kafka, Intertextuality, Twentieth Century Literature, and 12 moreAmerican Novel, Philip Roth, Holocaust, History of Czechoslovakia, Kafka Studies, Bruno Bettelheim, Kafka, Metamorphosis, Modern Czech Writers, Czechoslovakia In Literature, Franz Kafka's A Hunger Artist, Anne Frank The Diary of a Young Girl, and Czech and Slovak dissident movement
Research Interests: Nineteenth Century United States, Christian socialism, American Novel, Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture, William Dean Howells, and 7 moreAmerican Literary Realism, Naturalism, and Modernism, Annie Kilburn, Criticism of Charity, Criticism of Philanthropy, Christian Charity, Sinclair Lewis, and Attacks on Howells
This volume includes an interview conducted by Stanislav Kolář, intertextual studies by Aristi Trendel (Roth cf. Updike), Petr Anténe (Roth cf. Zadie Smith) and Christopher Koy (Roth cf. Singer); Mike Witcombe’s analysis of Roth’s complex... more
This volume includes an interview conducted by Stanislav Kolář, intertextual studies by Aristi Trendel (Roth cf. Updike), Petr Anténe (Roth cf. Zadie Smith) and Christopher Koy (Roth cf. Singer); Mike Witcombe’s analysis of Roth’s complex portrayals of sexual libertinism to David Lukeš and Hana Ulmanová’s treatment of his alleged offensiveness to Jews; and finally stopping with Valerie Roberge’s links to Kierkegaard.