Peter V. Zima

Peter Václav Zima is a literary critic and a social scientist born in Prague 1946. He is of Czech-German origin and has dual nationality such as Austrian and Dutch. He is emeritus professor of the Alpen-Adria-Universität in Klagenfurt (Austria) where he held the chair of General and Comparative Literature from 1983 to 2012. He studied sociology and politics at the University of Edinburgh from 1965 to 1969 and gained two doctorates in the Sociology of Literature at the universities of Paris IV (Doctorat du 3e cycle: 1971.) and Paris I (Doctorat d'Etat: 1979). He taught Sociology of Literature at the University of Bielefeld (Germany: 1972-1975) and Theory of Literature at the University of Groningen (Netherlands: 1976-1983). In 1983 he was appointed full professor of General and Comparative Literature at the Alpen-Adria-University in Klagenfurt (Austria). He worked as visiting professor at the Istituto Orientale in Naples (1985) and at the Universities of Leuven (1988), Graz (1991/92), Vienna (1994/95) and Santiago de Compostela (2004). In 1998 he was elected corresponding Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences; in Vienna, in 2010 he became a member of the Academia Europaea in London. In 2014 he was appointed honorary professor at the East China Normal University in Shanghai His fields of research include: theory of literature and aesthetics, sociology and social philosophy Sociology of texts: Zima has developed a sociology of texts which draws partly on the works of the Russian philosopher and literary critic, Mikhail M. Bakhtin, and Algirdas J. Greimas, the Lithuanian semiotician. He attempts to explain all types of texts or discourses within the framework of a social and linguistic situation and in relation to group languages or sociolects. Ideology and theory: In the context of this sociology, Zima has proposed a distinction between ideology and theory as discourses.