Department of British and American Studies at the - Univerzita ...

mentioned journal. Apart from that, he was also a correspondent of the Shakespeare Data
Bank, which is a supplement to the journal Shakespeare Newsletter published in Chicago.
Nevertheless, Jozef Olexa certainly did not focus on English studies as a narrowly
conceived field. His interest in the issues of literary theory also led him to follow the activities
of his colleagues who transcended beyond the frame of literatures written in English. This can
be proved by a review of an English publication of the monograph by the important Slovak
theoretician Dionýz Ďurińin Theory of Literary Comparatistics. But also in this review he
proved to be a devoted Anglicist applying the knowledge of general literary theory to English
literary history. Moreover, he manifested his pedagogical focus and pointed to some
inconsistencies in the terminology used in the English text of this work.
This brief and thus necessarily inadequate and fragmentary look at the life of Professor
Olexa would be incomplete if we did not refer to his rich international contacts and
willingness to support British and American Studies in Slovakia from an organizational point
of view as well. As I know from the archive sources of Comenius University, and also from
the article by the above mentioned writer Konńtantín Palkovič, Jozef Olexa had been a
member and later also chairman of the Circle of Modern Philologists associated with the
Slovak Academy of Sciences. In the field of evaluating translations into Slovak he was active
as a member and also chair of the committee for the Ján Holý Prize for the best translation of
artistic literature in Slovakia. He also used to be a member of the Association of Modern
Philologists in the USA, had contacts with important Anglicists across the whole world and
received invitations to take part in conferences and symposiums. However, in the 1970s and
1980s, due to the pressures of the secret police, he often had to refuse such opportunities. But
all along his career he had intensive contacts with colleagues from the Czech Republic. For
example, he took part in the first British and American Studies Conference in Brno, where he
spoke about the historical conditions and differences between Czech and Slovak English
studies. I recall his having invited Professor Zdeněk Stříbrný to Bratislava in the late 1980s.
This Czech literary historian and lecturer spoke about the circumstances connected with the
preparation of the History of English Literature (in two volumes) which had been published
some time before this visit. In spite of the unfavourable conditions, Professor Olexa managed
to lecture at Columbia University on the history and development of the English sonnet in
1970, at a seminar in Cambridge in 1983 he dealt with Slovak theatre and its system of
financing, and at the University in Marburg in Germany in 1991 he lectured about the
contemporary state of English Studies in Czechoslovakia. At the same time, he was a member
of many academic bodies of universities and participated in the process of granting academic
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