German Studies
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Ewa M. Thompson

Research Professor

Thompson

Email: ethomp@rice.edu Phone: x4868 Office: 307 Rayzor Hall 

Education

  • PhD, Vanderbilt University, 1967
  • MFA, Sopot Conservatory of Music, 1963
  • BA, University of Warsaw, Poland, 1963

Areas of Interest

  • Russian and Polish literature and culture

Personal Statement

Ewa Thompson began her scholarly work by writing a PhD dissertation in comparative criticism titled Russian Formalism and Anglo-American New Criticism: A Comparative Study, which was published by Mouton. She continued her theoretical pursuits in a series of articles in Modern Age, the most recent being “Ways Out of the Postmodern Discourse” (2003). Her major fields of interest are Russian literature and culture and their ideological underpinnings. In Understanding Russia: The Holy Fool in Russian Culture (1987/2004), which has also been translated into Chinese, Professor Thompson explored value indeterminacy in Russian culture as manifested in the figure of iurodivyi, or holy fool. Professor Thompson’s principal work, Imperial Knowledge: Russian Literature and Colonialism (2000)—translated into Polish and Ukrainian with a Chinese translation forthcoming in 2009—proposed a reading of Russian literature based on Edward Said’s Orientalism, and showed Russian literature’s entanglements with the political power of the Russian state.

Professor Thompson’s work on Polish literature and culture began with a book on Witold Gombrowicz, a Polish expatriate writer, which was published in 1979 and ranslated into Polish in 2002. Her interest in postcolonial issues with regard to Poland manifested itself in a series of articles and book chapters she published in Poland in recent years, the most recent being “The Surrogate Hegemon in Polish Postcolonial Discourse,” forthcoming in Anna G. Niemiec (ed.), Faces of Europe (Warsaw: Polish Academy of Sciences, 2009).

For her articles in Modern Age upholding logocentric epistemology Thompson received the Will Herberg Prize in 2003. For her work as founder and editor of the Sarmatian Review (1981-present) she received the Turzanski Prize in 2004.

Selected Publications

  • Imperial Knowledge: Russian Literaure and Colonialism (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000).
  • Understanding Russia: The Holy Fool in Russian Culture (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987).
  • The Search for Self-Definition in Russian Literature (Houston, TX: Rice University Press / Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1991).
  • Witold Gombrowicz (New York: Twayne, 1979).
  • Russian Formalism and Anglo-American New Criticism: A Comparative Study (Amsterdam: Mouton, 1971).
  • “Postcolonial Russia,” in Prem Poddar, Rajeev S. Patke, and Lars Jensen (eds.), A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures: Continental Europe and its Empires (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 412-7.
  • “Postkolonialne refleksje,” Porownania 5 (2008), 113-26.
  • “Postmodernizm, pamiec, logocentryzm,” in Hanna Gosk and Bozena Karwowska (eds.), (Nie)obecnosc: Pominiecia i przemilczenia w narracjach XX wieku (Warsaw: Dom Wydawniczy ELIPSA, 2008), 54-75.
  • “Imperskoe znanie: russkaia literatura i kolonializm,” Perekrestki 7/1-2 (2007), 32-75.
  • “Leo Tolstoy and the Idea of a Good Life,” in Lidia Liburska (ed.), Kultura rosyjska w ojczyznie i diasporze (Krakow: Jagiellonian University Press, 2007), 231-8.
  • “Anton Chekhov and Russian Colonialism: The Denial of Identity in Ostrov Sakhalin,” in Alicja Wolodzko-Butkiewicz and Ludmila Lutevici (eds.), Dzielo Antoniego Czechowa dzisiaj (Warsaw: University of Warsaw Press, 2005), 75-86.
  • “Ways of Remembering: The Case of Poland,” Toronto Slavic Quarterly 12, (Spring 2005).
  • “Holy Fools and Shamanism,” in Andrei A. Znamenski (ed.), Shamanism: Critical Concepts in Sociology, vol. II (London: Routledge, 2004), 355–82.
  • “Discourse, Empire and Memory in Postcommunist Russia,” New Zealand Slavonic Journal 37 (2003), 155-64.