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Nina Pelikan Straus

Professor Emerita of Literature

Nina Pelikan Straus, professor emerita of literature at Purchase College, is a feminist literary scholar and critic. Her work includes Dostoevsky and the Woman Question: Rereadings at the End of a Century (St. Martins, 1994) and articles on Tolstoy, Hardy, Mann, Conrad, Kafka, Kundera, Conrad, Sebald, Brontë, Freudian theory, feminist theory, and Derrida.

Straus, who retired in 2013, taught at Purchase for more than 30 years. She was also a founding member of the creative writing program and a member of the interdisciplinary gender studies faculty.

Publications

Selected:

JOE-ANSWERS A Conversation with Joseph Frank, Common Knowledge 19 (3):399-410 (2013).

Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West by Clare Cavanagh (Review), Common Knowledge 19 (2):387-387 (2013).

Sebald, Wittgenstein, and the Ethics of Memory, Comparative Literature 61 (1):43-53 (2009).

Grand Theory on Trial: Kafka, Derrida, and the Will to Power, Philosophy and Literature 31 (2):378-393 (2007).

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

A Taste for the Secret, Common Knowledge 10 (2):353-354 (2004).

Dostoevsky‘s Derrida, Common Knowledge 8 (3):555-567 (2002).

Transforming Franz Kafka‘s Metamorphosis, The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka, Corngold, Stanley, ed. and translator. New York: WW. Norton & Co. (1996).
Originally published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 14.3 (1989): 651-67. Revised 1994.

Emma, Anna, Tess: Skepticism, Betrayal, and Displacement, Philosophy and Literature 18 (1):72-90 (1994).

“Why did I say ‘Women!’?” Raskolnikov Reimagined, Diacritics 23,1:54 (1993).

Rethinking Feminist Humanism, Philosophy and Literature 14 (2):284-303 (1990).