Biographical Sketch
Nikolai Endres, Ph.D. Department of English Western Kentucky University Bowling Green, KY 42101 (270) 745 5718
In May 2000, I received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UNC Chapel Hill and now am a tenured associate professor of world literature at Western Kentucky University, after teaching English and French at the University of the Ozarks for two years. I specialize in Great Books, classical philology, ancient and modern mythology, minority literatures, critical theory, and gay and lesbian studies. My dissertation, Failures of Love, explores the appropriations of Plato's discourses on love and other Platonic signifiers in E. M. Forster's Maurice, Thomas Mann's Tod in Venedig, and André Gide's Corydon. I begin by representing Plato's erotic model in light of prevalent Greek attitudes toward love/Love and contrasting the Symposium with the Phaedrus. Although Plato is curiously reticent about the physical aspects of Eros, he does acknowledge the existence of sexual desire in the body (Alcibiades) and the soul (the black horse). I then discuss the major transformations of Eros in the nineteenth century and situate them in the wider cultural, national, and social backgrounds of Platonic love in Great Britain, Germany, and France. In my three chapters on Forster, Mann, and Gide, I apply these Platonic signifiers and interpret their numerous and obviously deliberate misappropriations. I also challenge traditional readings of my works, such as Robert Martin's “double structure” in Maurice or hostile dismissals of Mann's novella that distort the Platonic heritage and the author's biographical record, or offer an assessment of Corydon with the help of the elenchus and the very Socratic development from the natural sciences to philosophy. I ground my dissertation in a framework of Michel Foucault's idea of sexuality as a construct and argue in conclusion that Forster, Mann, and Gide radically departed from and reworked Platonic idealism in favor of physical desire. My research reflects a fundamental belief in the presence of ancient literature in our time. I know a few languages and have a classical background that I use to compare to modern works. I have investigated the politics of sex and gender in antiquity and modernity in my dissertation, but also in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, and Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar. I am further interested in the heritage of Greek tragedy, in the legacy of Petronius, in literary theory and rhetoric, and in the gay novel. In the future I plan to write on Platonic love in Mary Renault's The Charioteer, Patricia Nell Warren's The Front Runner, and Yukio Mishima's Forbidden Colors. I also want to compare Petronius' Satyricon and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. I find great joy in teaching and believe in a balanced combination of research and teaching. Teaching is research put into action. I teach masterpieces of world literature from antiquity to modernity, a challenging endeavor for the instructor, who must immerse himself in a new literary world nearly every week. These classes include Homer and Virgil, Boccaccio and Chaucer, Dante and Milton, Cervantes and Rabelais, Shakespeare and Goethe, Flaubert and Kafka, Mann and Sartre, Faulkner and Allende, Joyce and Woolf, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck, Kawabata and Mishima, Morrison and Achebe. My students show an extraordinary enthusiasm to supplement an ancient or modern work with their own concerns, anxieties, or beliefs, and often anticipate the common question “What can we learn from the classics?” The comments on my course evaluations validate the appeal of my comparative, theoretical, interdisciplinary, and multi-cultural approach. What greater reward could I receive than “I now want to major in literature”? I am particularly pleased with a class I first taught in the Spring of 2003: Gay and Lesbian Literature, crosslisted with Women's Studies, and apparently a first in all of Kentucky. We read and analyzed a number of “gay” and “lesbian” texts from the past to the present, from Biblical and Homeric times to contemporary fiction, from Plato to Nato. Throughout the semester, we challenged and defined the concepts of sex and gender, masculinities and feminism, constructionism and essentialism, homophobia and diversity, oppression and empowerment, acquiescence and resistance - in a both global and historical context. Originally a one-time offering, this class is now part of the university curriculum and will be taught every other year; it is also an essential component of Western's Sexuality Studies minor. Last but not least a word about myself: I like to travel the world and have seen many parts of it, take my bike for long rides, lift weights and develop my muscles, wine and dine out, go to the movies, and read everything I can get my hands on. Let Dorian Gray have the final word: “if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream, I believe that the world would gain such a fresh insight of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal.” |