Jenifer Presto, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Comparative Literature

Profile

Jenifer Presto received her Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures (with a minor in Comparative Literature) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1996. Before coming to the University of Oregon in the fall of 2003, she served for a year as resident director of the Wisconsin program at Moscow State University and taught at the University of Virginia and the University of Southern California. She also held an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Slavic at the University of Southern California for a year. Professor Presto has published several essays on Russian Modernism in Russian Literature, Slavic and East European Journal, Slavic Review, and the Cambridge History of Women’s Writing in Russia. Her book on gender and Russian Modernism, Beyond the Flesh: Alexander Blok, Zinaida Gippius, and the Symbolist Sublimation of Sex, will appear soon with the University of Wisconsin Press. Her new book project, called The Other Motherland: Italy and the Modern Russian Imagination, examines Russia’s cultural encounters with Italy in the twentieth century and takes as its starting point the devastating earthquake in Messina of 1908 that resulted in an outpouring of support from such important figures as Alexander Blok and Maxim Gorky. Although Professor Presto’s research interests are focused primarily on Russian Modernism, gender studies, and cultural studies, she has taught courses on a number of different topics in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature including Realism, Symbolism and Decadence, the Avant-Garde, and marriage plots, as well as courses on literary theory.

Education

University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Ph.D. Slavic Languages and Literatures with Comparative Literature Minor May 1996
• M.A. Slavic Languages and Literatures May 1989

Middlebury College

• M.A. Russian Language August 1988

Smith College

• A.B. Russian Literature May 1985

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Publications

Book

• Beyond the Flesh: Alexander Blok, Zinaida Gippius, and the Symbolist Sublimation of Sex.
  Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press (to appear January 2009).

Refereed Journal Articles

• “Unbearable Burdens: Aleksandr Blok and the Modernist Resistance to Progeny and Domesticity.” Slavic Review vol. 63, no.1 (2004): 6-25.
• “The Androgynous Gaze of Zinaida Gippius.” Russian Literature XLVIII-I (2000): 87-115.
• “Reading Zinaida Gippius: Over Her Dead Body.” Slavic and East European Journal vol. 43, no. 4 (1999): 621-35.
• “The Fashioning of Zinaida Gippius.” Slavic and East European Journal vol. 42, no. 1 (1998): 58-75.
• “Ivan Fedorovich Shpon’ka i ego tetushka’ as ‘Oral’ Narrative, or ‘Food for the Critics.’” Russian Literature XXXIX (1996): 359-72.

Book Chapter

• “Women in Russian Symbolism: Beyond the Algebra of Love.” In A History of Women’s Writing in Russia. Eds. Adele M. Barker & Jehanne Gheith. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 134-52.

Work in Progress

Book

• The Other Motherland: Italy and the Modern Russian Imagination.

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Recent Courses

COLT 203 World of Poetry: Modernist Lyric

• Virginia Woolf claimed that "on or around December 1910, human nature changed," while D.H. Lawrence identified 1915 as the point at which the old world ended. Although there might be some argument about the exact date, most would agree that the early twentieth century witnessed the birth of a new age and way of thinking that marked a radical break with the past. This course will be devoted to an in-depth analysis of the poetry of several important Anglo-American, French, and Russian Modernists who came of age as writers amidst the cataclysms of the early twentieth century. We will read works by some poets who willingly embraced the death of the old era and the shock of the new, as well as works by others who struggled desperately to cling to the past and to tradition. We will not only pay attention to issues of style but will also consider the way in which gender, politics, and history inform the works we read. The writers whose works we will consider may include W.B. Yeats, Alexander Blok, T. S. Eliot, Osip Mandelstam, H.D., Anna Akhmatova, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Vladimir Mayakovsky. All readings will be made available in English.

COLT 360 Gender and Identity in Literature: Adulterous Fictions

• This course will be devoted to an analysis of fiction dealing with the topic of adultery with particular attention on texts that focus on the problem of female adultery and female sexuality. The course will begin with a discussion of Flaubert's classic text of female adultery, Madame Bovary, and will then go on to examine the way in which this topic has been taken up by authors in several different cultural contexts. Among the texts we may read are Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Tagore's The Home and the World, Chekhov's "Lady with a Lapdog," Nabokov's "Spring in Fialta," and Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being. Students will be expected to make one brief presentation, write two short papers, and take a final examination. All works will be made available in English. However, students will be encouraged to read the texts in the original language whenever possible.

COLT 4/561 Studies in Contemporary Theory: Writing Disaster

• How have human beings used writing and other forms of representation to come to terms with natural and man-made catastrophes? Can natural disasters remain safely within the realm of the natural? Or are they events that are necessarily open to politicization? And similarly how have political and social disasters, in turn, fallen prey to a process of naturalization? In other words, what similarities exist between the representation of natural and social and political catastrophes? And how is the representation of natural and man-made disasters altered depending on whether it is a distant event for the writer or artist in either temporal or geographical terms? These are just some of the questions this course will attempt to answer. Drawing on a wide range of different texts--literature, popular culture, philosophy, and psychoanalysis--this course will focus on a series of case studies ranging from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D to the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 to the 1917 Russian Revolution to World War II and the Holocaust to 9/11 and the recent South Asian tsunami. The artists, writers, and thinkers whose works we will study may include Arendt, Blanchot, Blok, Duras, Freud, Kant, Kleist, Sebald, Kant, Pliny, and Voltaire, as well as Spiegelman, who will be presenting a public lecture this term in conjunction with the COLT Reading Project on In the Shadow of No Towers. Participation is welcome by students from the social sciences and sciences, as well as from the humanities.

COLT 418/518 Modernisms: Gender and Modernism

• This course will be devoted to an exploration of the problem of gender and Modernism, and will place specific emphasis on how Modernism concerns itself with the representation of woman, femininity, and, in some cases, female pathology. We will begin the course by considering two famous male Modernist narratives about femininity, Gustave Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary and Sigmund Freud's highly novelistic study The Case of Dora, turning in the main part of the course to an examination of fiction and essays by important Anglo-American, French, and Russian Modernists that complicate these portrayals of femininity and female selfhood. We will consider not only how male Modernists exhibit a creative investment in the feminine (Flaubert, for example, claimed that "Madame Bovary, c'est moi") but also how both female and male Modernists respond to existing male (and female) representations of woman and femininity. The authors whose works we will read may include: Djuna Barnes, André Breton, Gustave Flaubert, Sigmund Freud, Zinaida Gippius, James Joyce, Boris Pasternak, Gertrude Stein, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Virginia Woolf.