Malynne Sternstein

I am a student and admirer of dark humor in all its potentialities and actualizations.  Because of this predilection to the adverse incongruous, I devote myself to those who exform knowledge: Kafka, Kundera, Foucault, Hrabal, Borges, Magritte, Štyrský, Zweig, Černý, et al.  My current research appears distinctly threefold, though in reality, they converge on the notion of construal and dis/belief:  a monograph on the psychogeography of Vladimir Nabokov's eidetic imagination; a book on the Lacanian model of oblative anxiety as it can be discovered in horror film; and a series of essays on the genealogy of legal discourses surrounding hooliganism, especially as the term is and has been exploited in East-Central Europe.  I am also working on two projects on Czech film, one is a book project (with co-author) on the long 1950s and the other on the Czech New Wave and French Leftist réssentiment.

Work with Students

I have advised theses ranging from painstakingly close analyses of texts and textualities to critical theory-driven projects on film, horror, violence, memory, hip hop, and anxiety.  I have advised theses ranging from painstakingly close analyses of texts and textualities to critical theory-driven projects on film, horror, violence, memory, hip hop, and anxiety. 

• “This Impossible Toyen.” In The Popular Avant-Garde. (Rodopi, 2010).
• "Velimir Khlebnikov.  The Pilgrimages of a Futurist homo sacer." (Futurist Yearbook, 2019).
• Czechs of Chicagoland.  (Arcadia, 2008).
• The Will to Chance.  Necessity and Arbitrariness in the Czech Avant-Garde from Poetism to Surrealism. (Slavica, 2007).
• “Laughter, Gesture, and Flesh: Kafka's In the Penal Colony." (Modernism/Modernity, 2001).

• Kafka in Prague
• Nabokov's Lolita
• Nabokov's Pale Fire
• Czechoslovak New Wave Cinema
• The Philosophy of Architecture
• Lacan's Four Fundamentals Principles of Psychoanalysis
• Kitsch, Camp, Cute
• Critical Methodologies: Adorno to Žižek