Emil Volek

Emil Volek is a professor of Spanish at Arizona State University. He also works in Slavic literary and cultural theory, semiotics and aesthetics. He is the author of Cuatro claves para la modernidad: Análisis semiótico de textos hispánicos: Aleixandre, Borges, Carpentier, Cabrera Infante (Madrid 1984); Metaestructuralismo: Poética moderna, semiótica narrativa y filosofía de las ciencias sociales (Madrid 1985); Literatura hispanoamericana entre la modernidad y la postmodernidad (Bogota 1994); Znak, funkce a hodnota: Estetika a sémiotika umĕní Jana Mukařovského v proudech současného myšlení. Zápisky z podzemí postmoderny [Sign, Function, and Value. Aesthetics and Semiotics of the Arts of Jan Mukařovský within the Contemporary Critical Currents. Notes From the Postmodern Underground] (Prague 2004); La mujer que quiso ser amada por Dios. Sor Juana Inés en la cruz de la crítica (Madrid 2016); Obra selecta: Literatura cubana e hispanoamericana (Valencia 2020). He is the editor of Antología del Formalismo ruso y el grupo de Bajtin, I-II (Madrid 1992, 1995); Signo, función y valor: Estética y semiótica del arte de Jan Mukařovský (Bogota 2000, 2020; partial pirated ed. Bs. Aires 2011); Latin America Writes Back: Postmodernity in the Periphery. An Interdisciplinary Cultural Perspective (Routlege 2002, 2007, 2014); Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda: Tu amante ultrajada no puede ser tu amiga. Cartas de amor/novela epistolar (Madrid 2004); Teoría teatral de la Escuela de Praga: De la fenomenología a la semiótica performativa (Madrid/Bogota 2013); Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, El sueño (1690) (Madrid 2019). 

Included in “Notable 100 Czech émigré scientists encyclopedia” (2011). Commemorative Medal, awarded by Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña (1999). Commemorative Centennial Medal “José Lezama Lima,” awarded by Instituto Cubano del Libro (2016). Outstanding Mentor Award, awarded by Associated Students of ASU (1993). Andres Perez-Simon, ed. Despistemes: La teoria literaria y cultural de Emil Volek (2018).

He completed his doctorate at Charles University, Prague, Czechoslovakia in 1970: Doctor Philosophiae in History of Romance Literatures, Specialization in History of Spanish and Ibero-American Literatures, and in Theory of Literature. Dissertation: Dos décadas de la narrativa de Alejo Carpentier: 1944-1962 (Director: Oldřich Bĕlič). He pursued a postgraduate program in Aesthetics, also at Charles University from 1970-1972. His thesis was: Dialectics of the Specificity of Art: Russian Formalism, Czech Structuralism, and Marxism, 1973 (in Czech). He also attended the School of Criticism and Theory, University of California at Irvine in the summer of 1978 (NEH Fellowship; seminars with Hayden White, Wolfgang Iser, and Fredric Jameson).