Rita Dirks

Biography

I believe in a close relationship between art and faith, and especially literature and faith: both require insight, imagination, and devotion. For me, literature is an external expression or symbol of the strivings of the soul. My graduate work and research culminated in a dissertation entitled The Symbolist Novel as Secular Scripture in which the three Symbolist novels that I examined (Huysmans's A Rebours/Against the Grain, Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Bely's Petersburg) portray the novel as shifting from an aesthetics of spirituality to a spirituality of aesthetics. Because the Symbolist novel is written against the grain of popular culture, it has much in common with faith literature; the Symbolists's transcendental view of art, their hermeticism, their anti-materialism and anti-utilitarianism, martyrdom, and commitment to the sacredness of art (combined with personal conversions and visions of Christ) intrigue my scholarly imagination. Presently, the Symbolist/Decadent age of Modernism remains my primary area of research. My most recent paper, which I delivered at the 2012 conference of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages, was entitled "Soviet Gothic: Eating in Hell in Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita.” I have taught a wide variety of courses, with special emphasis on world literature, literary theory, Modernism, Romanticism, women's literature, Russian literature, and film.

Research Interest

English