I am currently Senior Lecturer (with tenure) in the Department of English Literature and American Studies. My academic interests include poetry, poetics, prosody, sound, punctuation, psychoanalysis, literary theory, and cognitive aspects of figurative language. I teach undergraduate and graduate courses and advise PhD theses in these subject areas, and I am always enthusiastic to chat about anything related to English and American poetry (among my current favorite poets are E.E. Cummings, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Creeley, but that list keeps changing!). Before my appointment at Tel Aviv University, I was a visiting scholar for two years in the Department of English at NYU. I have been serving as the Associate Editor of Poetics Today since 2021, and serving in the executive committee of the Language Theory forum of the MLA since 2023. I currently serve as the chair of the Department of English Literature and American Studies.
Dr. Roi Tartakovsky
About
Research
My academic interests include poetry, poetics, prosody, sound, punctuation, psychoanalysis, literary theory, and cognitive aspects of figurative language.
Publications
Book
Tartakovsky, Roi. Surprised by Sound: Rhyme's Inner Workings. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2021.
Special Issues Guest Editing
Evron, Nir and Roi Tartakovsky, editors. Special Issue: The AI Revolution: Speculations on Authorship, Pedagogy and the Future of the Profession. Poetics Today 45.2 (2024): 189-371.
Tartakovsky, Roi, editor. Special Issue: Free Verse Rhythms. Style 49.1 (2015): 1-111.
Refereed Articles and Book Chapters
Tartakovsky, Roi, and Yeshayahu Shen. "'Uncle Al is old, has brown eyes and dementia': The Importance of Order in Zeugmas." Language and Literature 32.4 (2023): 424-36.
Tartakovsky, Roi, and Yeshayahu Shen. "'Insistent as Anesthetic': Difficult Similes Subserving the Poetic Context." Journal of Literary Semantics 52.1 (2023): 23-40.
Tartakovsky, Roi, and Yeshayahu Shen. "The Storm Sank My Boat and My Dreams: The Zeugma as a Breach of Iconicity." Metaphor and Symbol 38.2 (2023): 162-73.
Tartakovsky, Roi. "On the Verge of Verse: Charles Reznikoff's Lineations in Holocaust." Style 56.4 (2022): 351-73.
Tartakovsky, Roi, David Fishelov and Yeshayahu Shen. “Not as Clear as Day: On Irony, Humor and Poeticity in the Closed Simile.” Metaphor and Symbol 34.3 (2019): 185-96.
Tartakovsky, Roi, and Yeshayahu Shen. "Meek as Milk and Large as Logic: A Corpus Study of the Non-Standard Poetic Simile." Language and Literature 28.3 (2019): 203-20.
Tartakovsky, Roi, and Yeshayahu Shen. "Flat as a Wall or Flat as a Butcher's Hand: The Poetic Simile and Second-Order Semantic Foregrounding." Scientific Study of Literature 8.2 (2018): 293-312.
Tartakovsky, Roi, and Yeshayahu Shen. "'Simple as a Fire': Making Sense of the Non-Standard Poetic Simile." Journal of Literary Semantics 47.2 (2018): 103-19.
Tartakovsky, Roi. “Rhyme Random: Robert Creeley’s Sporadic Rhymes.” On Rhyme. Ed. David Caplan. Liège: Presses Universitaires de Liège, 2017. 81-100.
Tartakovsky, Roi. “Acoustic Confusion and Medleyed Sound: Stevens’ Recurrent Pairings.” The Wallace Stevens Journal 39.2 (2015): 234-49. [Recipient of the John Serio Award for the best essay in the Wallace Stevens Journal for 2015]
Tartakovsky, Roi. “Free, Verse, Rhythm: An Introduction.” Style 49.1 (2015): 1-7.
Tartakovsky, Roi. “The Case for Pace.” Style 49.1 (2015): 65-77.
Tartakovsky, Roi. “Towards a Theory of Sporadic Rhyming.” Language and Literature 23 (2014): 101-17.
Tartakovsky, Roi. “E. E. Cummings’s Parentheses: Punctuation as Poetic Device.” Style 43 (2009): 215-47. [Reprinted in: Essays in Stylistics Vol. 2. Ed. Yu Shanzhi. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Languages Education Press, 2012].
Tartakovsky, Roi. “Rhyme and Nachträglichkeit.” Psychoanalytic Encounters: Interdisciplinary Papers in Applied Psychoanalysis. Ed. Aleksandar Dimitrijevic, Elizabeth Fox and Murray Schwartz. Belgrade: Belgrade University, 2009. 41-49.
Other Publications
Tartakovsky, Roi. "Duchamp is My Lawyer: The Polemics, Pragmatics, and Poetics of UbuWeb by Kenneth Goldsmith (a review)." Common Knowledge 29.1 (2023): 117-18.
Tartakovsky, Roi. "love are in we." Blog Post for E. E. Cummings Society Blog. 2015.
