Wlad Godzich

Wlad Godzich (Władysław Bogusz Godzich, Wladyslaw Bogusz Godzich) (born 13 May 1945 in Germany, raised in France) is a literary critic, literary theorist, translator, and scholar. He is attributed with influencing the conceptualization of modern literary critical theory. He served as Professor of general and comparative literature, and critical studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz until 2022.

Career Godzich has published and translated several books, edited eight collections of essays, and authored over a hundred scholarly articles, lectures, and papers. In 2000, Godzich joined the University of California, Santa Cruz as dean of Humanities.

Organizer of dozens of international conferences, he also acts as consultant to many university presses and organizers of university programs in the Americas and Europe. He sits on the editorial board of multiple American, European and Asian journals, both print and electronic. His research grants have been primarily from US, Canadian, Swedish, Swiss and private agencies.

Work in the 1980s Through his work at the University of Minnesota Press, Godzich brought important works of critical theory into English translation. His essays during this period were well received by critics as they were among the first to link deconstruction, cultural criticism, and third-world literatures through linguistics:

they can now be seen as tesserae composing a theoretical mosaic of remarkable scope. The patterns of his thought emerge from his interest in the relationship between language and literacy-the latter conceived as "a determinate set of relations that we have to language." Godzich reinvigorates the semiological project proposed by Saussure but forsaken by his heirs: that of exploring the social functioning of language in its historical and rhetorical actualizations.

Selected works The Emergence of Prose: An Essay in Prosaics (Minnesota, 1987; ) Philosophie einer un-europäischen Literaturkritik (Fink, 1989) Crisis of Institutionalized Literature in Spain (Minnesota, 1991; ) The Culture of Literacy (Harvard University Press, 1994; )