Nina Pelikan Straus, Ph.D.

Professor of Literature
School of Humanities

Office: 1058 HUM Bldg
Tel: (914) 251-6594
Fax: (914) 251-6559
Email: nina.straus@purchase.edu

Dr. Nina Pelikan Straus is a professor of literature and member of the creative writing
faculty in the School of Humanities, as well as a member of the interdisciplinary women's studies faculty. Dr. Straus has taught literature, women's studies, fiction writing, and variants of "Culture, Society, and the West" at Purchase since 1980, and has given conferences papers at the Modern Language Association, American Comparative Literature Society, International Society of Philosophy and Literature, and the International Conference for the Study of European Ideas.

Education
B.A. Bennington College; studied fiction writing with Bernard Malamud.
Ph.D. English, l977, New York University.

Courses Taught:
Introduction to Literature, CSW II, Introduction to Women's Studies, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and his Heirs, Classics of European Literature, Freud, The Modern Novel, Novels of Terrorism, Faust Legends, and the following literature seminars: Literary Theory, Kafka, The Brothers Karamazov.

Research Interest:
literature, philosophy, psychology.

Awards:
Purchase College Faculty Support Grants (1992-2000)
American Council of Learned Societies Travel Grant
NEH Humanities Seminar at Stanford University on "The Woman Question 1750-1950"
Continuing Education's 1996 Outstanding Faculty Award.

Books:
Dostoevsky and the Woman Question: Rereadings at the End of a Century. (St. Martin's Press 1994); Chinese edition (The Oriental Press, 2003)

“Erasing History and Deconstructing the Text,”  Milan Kundera and the Art of Fiction, (N.Y.: Garland 1992)

“The Exclusion of the Intended from Secret Sharing,” Joseph Conrad (Macmillan New Casebook), (London: MacMillan 1996)

"Transforming Kafka's 'Metamorphosis,’” The Norton Critical Edition of Kafka's "Metamorphosis” (N.Y.: Macmillan l996);

“Flights from The Idiot’s Womanhood,” The Idiot: A Critical Companion. (Northwestern University Press 1998)

“’Why Did I Say ‘Women’!: Raskolnikov Re-Imagined,” Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations (N.Y.: Chelsea House, 2004).

Short Stories:
“Curly of the Apts” Fiction 2 (1999): 83-93.

“Haven” Ascent (Fall 1990:63-72) 

“Breathers,” Ascent 13:3: 51-62.

Selected Recent Essays:
“Grand Theory on Trial: Kafka, Derrida, and the Will to Power.” Philosophy and Literature. 31:2 (October 2007): 378-391.     

“From Dostoevsky to Al Qaeda: What Fiction Says to Social Science.” Common Knowledge. 12:2 (Spring 2006): 197-213.

“Dostoevsky’s Derrida.” Common Knowledge. 8:30 (Fall 2002): 555-567.

“Fire, Gazes, and Brain-Body Repair in Bronte’s Jane Eyre.” PSYART: An Online Journal for Psychological Study of the Arts. http://www.clas.ufl.edu/ipsa/journal/2001_straus01.shtml#straus01

“Introduction.” Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, ed. Nina Pelikan Straus. Washington Square Press (Simon & Schuster 1998): i-xxv.
 
“The Fourth Blow to Narcissism and the Internet: Freud, Lacan, and the Cyber-screen.” Literature and Psychology. 43: 1 & 2  (1997): 96-109.

"Every Woman Loves a Nihilist: Stavrogin and Women in Dostoevsky's The Possessed.”  Novel (Spring l994): 271-286.

"Emma, Anna, Tess: Skepticism, Betrayal, Displacement.” Philosophy and Literature. 1.18 (April l994): 72-90.