Bonita Rhoads

Yale University, Comparative Literature, Graduate Student

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Bonita Rhoads earned her Ph.D. from Yale University in 2009 with a dissertation that explores the vital influence of domestic ideology and domestic fiction on modern literary history. She has been a lecturer at Charles University in Prague and was formerly Assistant Professor at Masaryk University in Brno. Her research interests focus on the experience of modernization and on the nineteenth-century genres that shape and reflect it, including domestic fiction, Gothic literature, the novel, detetive and crime fiction. While presently revising her dissertation as a book, she has published articles in Women’s Studies, Poe Studies, Litteraria Pragensia, Jouvert, and The Henry James Review. Her article, Poe's Genre-Crossing: From Domesticity to Detection, won the Poe Studies Association's Gargano Prize for a distinguished essay on Poe. She is co-editor of the 2018 anthology, Dušan Makavejev: Eros, Ideology, Montage, which includes essays from 18 international film theorists and artwork donated by Marina Abramović. She is also co-founder and director of the scholar-led guided walks company, Insight Cities (www.insightcities.com).

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Papers by Bonita Rhoads

“Woolf’s Gothic Modernism: Spirited Feminism in To the Lighthouse.”

Frontiers of privacy: The domestic enterprise of modern fiction

Poe's Genre Crossing:�??From Domesticity to Detection: POE'S GENRE CROSSING

Poe Studies, 2009

“Poe’s Genre-Crossing: From Domesticity to Detection” examines the crucial but critically unremar... more “Poe’s Genre-Crossing: From Domesticity to Detection” examines the crucial but critically unremarked influences of domestic fiction on the genre-founding detective stories of Edgar Allan Poe. Domestic novels achieved their immense appeal in the early nineteenth century in part by offering readers an ideal of home life as an antidote to the multiple alienations of the emerging marketplace. While the features of Poe’s detective obviously diverge in striking respects from those of the domestic heroine, the essay demonstrates that detective fiction nevertheless recreates the cultural functions of domestic fiction to counter and confound commercial culture. However, while the virtuous homemaker promoted by women’s fiction provides a shelter from the instrumentality of the public sphere, Poe’s detective (in appropriating elements of the domestic woman’s social role) drives the frontiers of the private sphere to a challenging new standard of nonconformity.

"An Aesthete's Lost War: Lyotard and the Un-Sublime Art of New Europe." Abolishing Prague: Essays and Interventions. Prague : Litteraria Pragensia, 2014. ISBN 978-80-7308-532-2, 30 pp.

In “An Aesthete’s Lost War: Lyotard and the Unsublime Art of New Europe,” Bonita Rhoads and Vadim... more In “An Aesthete’s Lost War: Lyotard and the Unsublime Art of New Europe,” Bonita Rhoads and Vadim Erent offer an extended analysis of the pop-inspired art of two prominent contemporary Czech artist-photographers, Lenka Klodova and Milena Dopitova. Looking at public art as it is actually being practiced in the wake of totalitarianism, Rhoads and Erent also contest Lyotard’s manifesto on the modernist aesthetic of the sublime as the exclusive mode by which a radical political art can be produced.

Henry James and the Plunder of Sentiment: Building the House of Modernism from The Spoils of Poynton. The Henry James Review, Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press, USA. ISSN 0273-0340, 2012, vol. 33, no. 2, pp. 147-164.

The Henry James Review, 2012

This essay outlines an unorthodox literary genealogy. By examining the vestiges of the sentimenta... more This essay outlines an unorthodox literary genealogy. By examining the vestiges of the sentimental plot in Henry James's The Spoils of Poynton it demonstrates that domestic fiction, written primarily by a cluster of American women authors in the nineteenth century, played a formative role in the advent of literary modernism. While the novel displays James's evolving focus on perception, it simultaneously reflects on sentimental ideology as a cultural and literary phenomenon, satirizing the domestic genre even while memorializing it. In James's generic conversions, the domestic interiors devoutly composed by sentimental authors emerge as models for the ornate psychic interiorities fashioned by modernist investigations of consciousness.

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Poe's Genre Crossing: From Domesticity to Detection. Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism: History, Theory, Interpretation, USA. ISSN 0090-5224, 2009, vol. 42, no. 1, pp. 14-40. Winner of the Poe Studies Association's annual Gargano Award for a distinguished essay on Poe

Poe Studies, 2009

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Sontag's Captions: Writing the Body from Riefenstahl to S&M. Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Taylor & Francis, 2008, No. 37, v. 8, s. 942-970. ISSN 0049-7878.

Women's Studies, 2008

In “Sontag’s Captions: Writing the Body from Riefenstahl to S & M,” Bonita Rhoads considers how S... more In “Sontag’s Captions: Writing the Body from Riefenstahl to S & M,” Bonita Rhoads considers how Susan Sontag altered her aesthetic convictions in response to her evolving writer’s conscience and produced some of the most indelible commentaries of her generation. Her scathing critique of Leni Riefenstahl continues to set the standard of criticism of the Nazi-friendly director despite Sontag’s own little-acknowledged mitigation of her excoriating essay “Fascinating Fascism” several years later. Rhoads’s essay establishes Sontag’s condemnation of Riefenstahl’s “fascist aesthetics” as a turning point in her growth as a woman of letters, elucidating how that oft-cited critique reveals not only Sontag’s ideological transformation, but also her response to the sexual revolution just as it was shifting from the heady idealism of the 60s to the garish affectations and irreverent fads of the 70s.

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Replaying Fort/Da: Swinburne and the Cult of Flagellation. Pornotopias: Image, Apocalypse, Desire. Prague: Charles University, 2008. s. 180-201, 21 s. ISBN 978-80-7308-291-8.

by Bonita Rhoads and Vadim Erent

In “Replaying Fort/Da through Victorian Masochism: Swinburne and the Cult of Flagellation,” Vadim... more In “Replaying Fort/Da through Victorian Masochism: Swinburne and the Cult of Flagellation,” Vadim Erent and Bonita Rhoads analyze the masochistic pornography collected, written and circulated throughout the Victorian period by a prominent group of upper-class British men, including the poet, Charles Algernon Swinburne. Using Freud’s conception of the Fort/Da game, Deleuze’s theory of masochism and Foucault’s identification of discipline with the rise of the bourgeoisie, the essay offers a psycho-social explanation for the British cult of flagellation as a genre of pornography that encapsulated class anxieties and also served to assert class identity in an era of modernization.

Books by Bonita Rhoads

Dušan Makavejev: Eros, Ideology, Montage. Prague : Litteraria Pragensia, 2018. 300 pp. ISBN 978-80-7308-564-3.

DUŠAN MAKAVEJEV: EROS, IDEOLOGY, MONTAGE, 2018

Contributors: Marina Abramović, Louis Armand, Nevena Daković, Vadim Erent, Goran Gocić, Benjamin ... more Contributors: Marina Abramović, Louis Armand, Nevena Daković, Vadim Erent, Goran Gocić, Benjamin Halligan, Patrick Kinsman, Ivana Kronja, Phillip Lopate, Katarina Mihailović, Lorraine Mortimer, Julianna Ostrovsky, Richard Porton, Maxim Pozdorovkin, Bonita Rhoads, Zoran Samardzija, Anna Schober, Steven Shaviro, Nevenka Stankovic, Aida Vidan.

Among the most idiosyncratic auteurs of avant-garde film, Dušan Makavejev was championed in the early 70s as the herald of art cinema’s next wave. In those years, film critics were calling Makavejev’s early movie, Love Affair (1967), the best film that Godard never made. Innocence Unprotected (1968) was pronounced a tour de force of cinematographic collage. WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) received a thirteen-minute standing ovation as well as the Luis Buñuel Award at Cannes & was later lauded as a subversive masterpiece & as “the flagship of ‘philosophical cinema.’” Francis Ford Coppola invited him to direct Apocalypse Now. Instead, Makavejev made Sweet Movie (1974), a conceptual sequel to WR, a politological, erotological, scatological, scandalous & unapologetic work which received practically no distribution, ending his honeymoon with film critics & with financial backers, nearly killing his career.

“Woolf’s Gothic Modernism: Spirited Feminism in To the Lighthouse.”

Frontiers of privacy: The domestic enterprise of modern fiction