GORAK, Jan 1952-

PERSONAL: Born October 12, 1952, in Blackburn, England; son of Jozef (a road mender) and Mary (a nurse; maiden name, Niland) Gorak; married Irene Elizabeth Mannion, November 17, 1984. Education: University of Warwick, B.A., 1975; attended University of Leeds, 1975-77; University of Southern California, M.A., 1981, Ph.D., 1983. Politics: "Disillusioned independent." Hobbies and other interests: Film, music (especially rock music).

ADDRESSES: Office—Department of English, University of Denver, University Park, Denver, CO 80208. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, lecturer in English, 1984-87, senior lecturer in English, 1987-88; University of Denver, Denver, CO, visiting associate professor, 1988-89, professor of English, 1991—.

MEMBER: Modern Language Association of America, American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, T. S. Eliot Society, Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association.

AWARDS, HONORS: Pringle Prize, English Academy of Southern Africa, 1986, for the article "Deus Artifex: Transformations of a Topos"; Mellon fellow of American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies at University of Texas—Austin; Humanities fellow, Oregon State University.

WRITINGS:

God the Artist: American Novelists in a Post-Realist Age, University of Illinois Press (Urbana, IL), 1987.

Critic of Crisis: A Study of Frank Kermode, University of Missouri Press (Columbia, MO), 1987.

The Alien Mind of Raymond Williams, University of Missouri Press (Columbia, MO), 1988. The Making of the Modern Canon: Genesis and Crisis of a Literary Idea, Athlone Press (London, England), 1990.

(Editor) Canon vs. Culture: Reflections on the Current Debate, Garland Publishing (New York, NY), 2000.

(Editor) Northrop Frye on Twentieth-Century Culture, University of Toronto Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2003.

Contributor to books, including The Legacy of Northrop Frye, edited by Alvin A. Lee and Robert D. Denham, University of Toronto (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1994; Teaching Contemporary Literary Theory to Undergraduates, edited by Dianne F. Sadoff and William E. Cain, MLA Publications (New York, NY), 1994; The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume 4, edited by Claude Rawson and H. B. Nisbet, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1997; and Northrop Frye: Eastern and Western Perspectives, edited by Jean O'Grady, [Toronto, Ontario, Canada], 2002. Contributor to academic journals, including English Studies in Africa, Denver Quarterly Theater Journal, and Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association Journal.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Civilization from Outside: Studies in the Emigration of an Idea.

SIDELIGHTS: Jan Gorak once told CA: "I am one of a number of displaced academic personnel trekking the five continents after the breakup of the British university system. Not surprisingly, my books reflect the darker areas of interest of the scholar in exile. In God the Artist: American Novelists in a Post-Realist Age, I examined the effect of the destructive creatorgod on modern literary culture. In Critic of Crisis: A Study of Frank Kermode and The Alien Mind of Raymond Williams, I showed how that culture induces a sense of crisis and alienation in its strongest critical exponents. Future projects will no doubt have a similar emphasis on the skeptical, restless, deracinated intelligence induced by an intellectual life of perpetual motion."

Gorak more recently told CA: "In The Making of the Modern Canon: Genesis and Crisis of a Literary Idea, I set myself the task of understanding whether all the nasty things said about that monolothic entity 'the canon' had any basis in fact or even in fiction. Perhaps to my surprise—for I have never considered myself a particularly conservative person—I found that they did not. Accordingly, I set out to understand what 'canon' did mean in the literary culture from early Elizabethan times to our own. I am now engaged in a similar enterprise for the idea of 'civilization.' Such tasks, perhaps less important than the collective uplift of a generation, are necessary if the past is not to fall into permanent disrepair."

Gorak later added: "My recent work on Northrop Frye has been the byproduct of my interest in the emigrating idea of civilization. But the excellence of Frye's work and the hugeness of his contribution has caused me to reopen my investigation into the question of civilization, to look again at what the future inquiry, so central to enlightened thinking and so increasingly remote to our own, can tell us about that question. I am increasingly drawn to writers like Diderot and Hume, for whom the humanities represent a way of suspending certainty and opening real investigation. I would say that the years since I was last in touch with Contemporary Authors have been years in which I have widened my reading considerably and have attempted to tap the positive potential of suspending my own convictions. I hope some of this comes through in what I am writing.

"I have also become more convinced that not much can come of a critical writing not immersed in the detail of the world its subjects inhabit. When I began to edit Frye, it was a source of constant delight to suspend oneself in the everyday life of 1920s and 1930s Toronto, a life that Frye himself thought rather narrow and philistine, but which seems a fertile seedbed for his own 'anti-modernistic' poetics. The possibilities of a criticism informed by milieu and moment seem much broader and deeper to me in 2002 than they did in 1992, and I imagine my work will reflect that conviction."