M.A. University of Vienna, 2013
M.phil. New York University, 2018
Ph.D. New York University, 2019
Dominik Zechner studied philosophy, film theory, performance studies, and media studies in Vienna before pursuing a Ph.D. in German literature at New York University, where he completed a Mellon-funded dissertation on Franz Kafka. Before joining Rutgers, he was the Artemis A.W. and Martha Joukowsky Postdoctoral Fellow at Brown University’s Pembroke Center. He is a specialist in literary theory, philology, and the philosophy of language. His wider research and teaching activities focus on psychoanalysis, poetic expression, modern prose, theories of pedagogy and pedagogical narratives, and pop culture.
Prof. Zechner has published four books, including two monographs. His book The Violence of Reading: Literature & Philosophy at the Threshold of Pain (Palgrave Macmillan 2024) offers a critical tour de force that expounds the scene of reading as the privileged site for mediations between language and pain. The act of reading produces an overwhelmed body exposed to various forms of linguistic duress. Most notably, the reader experiences a departure from phenomenal reality as the scene of reading causes the referential function of language to collapse. This collapse takes the form of a constitutive wounding of a reading body that remains painfully suspended between empirical demands and the pull of language. Pursuing this line of argument, the book explores a broad set of texts and contexts ranging from the rhetoric of masochism to depictions of literary suicide.
Zechner is also the author of Kafka und das Problem der Endlichkeit (“Kafka and the Problem of Finitude,” Sonderzahl 2024). Published to honor the centennial of Franz Kafka’s passing in 1924, the book discusses the narratological, formal, rhetorical, philosophical, and theological implications of the depiction of finitude in Kafka’s texts. Illuminating the hypothesis that Kafka’s writings stage a complex tension between language and death, it deems the literary work of art a form-of-survival that constitutively transgresses finitude’s boundary. Kafka routinely problematizes the linguistic representation of death, demonstrating that each closure of dying is survived by a linguistic capacity, a trace, an echo, a lament that will speak on and thereby challenge the authority of death.
Furthermore, Zechner is the co-editor of two collected volumes. Forces of Education: Walter Benjamin and the Politics of Pedagogy (Bloomsbury 2023) comprehensively investigates Benjamin’s early writings on school reform and educational critique. A second essay collection, Thresholds, Encounters: Paul Celan and the Claim of Philology (SUNY 2023), is dedicated to the relationship between Celan’s poetry and the Western philosophical tradition. In addition, Zechner is the editor of a special issue of Modern Language Notes (“What is a Prize?” vol. 131.5, 2016) that analyzes the rhetoric of literary prizes and their surrounding economy of prestige, and the co-editor of a special issue of parallax (“Initiations: The Pitfalls of Beginning,” vol. 28.3, 2022), dedicated to the problem of textual openings and first lines.
He has widely published on issues in psychoanalysis between Freud and Lacan, the philosophy of language (Nietzsche, Benjamin, Adorno, Hamacher), modern prose styles (Kafka, Musil, Bernhard), and post-war poetry (Celan, Brinkmann, Jandl). His research has appeared in differences, humanities, Journal of Romance Studies, Modern Language Notes, Oxford Literary Review, parallax, The German Quarterly, The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Translation & Literature, Triëdere, Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, and other venues.
Currently he is working on two major projects: The first, tentatively titled Departures: Language in the Ruins of Representation, investigates the referential function of language and the breakdowns it suffers within the realms of literature and poetry. The second is popculturally oriented and offers an exploration of the rhetoric of contemporary indie music from The National to boygenius.