Marcel Cornis-Pope, born in Arad, Romania, in 1946. Ph.D. from the University of Timisoara. Professor of English at the Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond.
Fellow (1 September 1999 – 30 June 2000)
As a member of the nucleus A Comparative History of Literatures of East-Central Europe, I accomplished three major tasks:
I clarified, in extensive discussions and collaborative writing with other members of this nucleus, the configuration of our projected History. The structure of two sections (on Temporal and Figural “Nodes”) has been totally revised. The other two sections (on Topographic and Institutional “Nodes”) have been partly overhauled to reflect a broader range of topics and a more coherent historical representation.
As a co-editor of the volume and co-ordinator of Part Two on literary topographies, I spent a significant amount of time in recruiting new contributions, editing them, and in some cases assembling disparate contributions into a coherent text. In the Topographies section, I recruited fifteen new contributions, edited twelve and wrote an introduction that discusses the problems of defining and mapping East-Central Europe, proposing alternatives to nationalistic cartographies. I also put together a subsection for Part One (Temporal Nodes), writing the theoretical introduction and one of the case studies; and contributed articles to Part Three on Institutional Nodes and Part Four on Figural Nodes.
I also made our project better known to interested scholars in Holland and abroad, through lectures held at NIAS, University of Toronto, University of Freiburg, Utrecht University, Antwerp University, University of Sophia, the New Europe College (Bucharest), and University of Cluj. This has resulted in a significant broadening of our circle of contributors that now include specialists in areas under-represented until recently (the Baltic countries, Albania, Macedonia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, etc.). With the help of NIAS, we were able to organise a final conference of our project (28 June to 1 July) that brought together thirty of these contributors from North America, Western Europe (including the Netherlands), and East-Central Europe. In addition to my work on the Comparative History of East-Central European Literary Cultures, I wrote two major articles for the Edinburgh Encyclopaedia of Postwar Literary Criticism and Theory, another article for a Ronald Sukenick collection, one scholarly review, and ten papers presented in the Netherlands and abroad. I also finished the final revision of a book manuscript entitled Narrative Innovation and Cultural Rewriting in the Cold War Era and After.