The essay discusses the literary-critical concepts of Matvei Kagan (1889-1937) - a Russian philosopher of Jewish origin, a student and follower of Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, and Ernst Cassirer, and a close friend of Mikhail Bakhtin in his early, constitutive period of the Nevel Circle (1918-1920). The concepts of love and bewilderment, as defined in Kagan's works on Turgenev and Pushkin, are examined in the context of his philosophy of history, culture, and art. In the center of Kagan's historical theory of literature lies the idea of the Jewish community as a model for canonization of the cultural work. Kagan views literature as generating self-awareness and national-cultural identity, either through tragic bewilderment at the loss of freedom and love in history (in the case of Pushkin) or through a culture's self-defining dialogue with other cultures (as in the case of Turgenev). The central concept of this approach is that of svive-libe - "love of environment," interpreted as love for a community's cultural contribution in the context of its purposefulness in a universal human context.

The article explores Margaret Atwood's engagement with the ethics of hospitality as manifested in her novel The Blind Assassin (2000) and the short story "The Art of Cooking and Serving" (2006). It claims that these works point to an ethical vision which is best understood in light of the philosophical ideas of radical hospitality suggested by Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida but with an important feminist revision. Focusing on allusions to an inspiring cookbook, prominent in the two works by Atwood, the article analyzes the works' appropriation and reformulation of the feminine myth of gracious housewifery for signifying both the subject's obligation to the other and the ideal of generous giving and attentive care. It addresses the conflict that Atwood stages between a feminist critique of the duty of hospitality imposed on women and the ethical view of the subject's un-chosen and absolute responsibility to another. 

The essay examines the epistemological possibilities of artistic imaginary languages and their ontological effects in the avant-garde movement "lettrism." The movement employed imaginary language, which illustrates an anti-rational theory of language. The problematics of such quasi-language are manifested most radically in relation to quietistlinguistic philosophy (Sprachkritik): the identification of the limits of thinking and language in philosophy confronts the utopian belief in the possibility of "private" communication in the avant-garde. Lettrism subverts the normative order of systematic language by means of invented signs, which are not arbitrary but unorthodox. These signs supposedly express that which philosophy designates as epistemic privacy - what can be known to one person only. The paradoxical claim that an imaginary language can express the epistemically private gives rise to what I term the mysticism of immanence. Neither distinctively religious nor atheistic, the mysticism of immanence is based on the idealistic assertion that one is able to express not only the existence but also the contents of epistemic privacy. Moreover, the renunciation of conventional language suggests that immanence is in this case alinguistic. In brief, for lettrists, thinking did not necessitate language. Lettrist imaginary language points out the necessity for convention as a stabilizing framework for meaning production. By advocating the idea of an "immediate message," which remains between mediation and immediacy, imaginary language exceeds the limits of immanence. Since an imaginary language cannot be shared or self-contained, it is an opening of immanence towards other than immanence. This other is not represented as any absolute transcendence, any version of the beyond, but rather as a collapse of the limits of immanence, limits that are subject to negotiation because the immediate message gives rise to a new and expanded sense of the immanent.

Through a reading of J. M. Coetzee's novel Disgrace this paper discusses the contemporary genre of reading literature in terms of an "ethics of perception." In the fourteen years since its publication the novel has elicited a rich body of commentary and criticism with an ethical edge, often focusing on the unfolding vision or stunted but developing perceptiveness of its uneasy protagonist David Lurie. This path of criticism is paradigmatic of a broader interest in studying literary works as paths to moral philosophical illumination. I discuss how the novel yields to this kind of reading, but also how this path of reading is complicated by its various other features, above all, a plurality of values that may be hard to reconcile and a Christian perspective of grace which is played against the novels secular, intellectual perspective on perceptiveness. I argue that reading Disgrace in terms of any pre-given ethical formula, however compelling, may be problematic considering the nature of Coetzee's authorship.

The article analyzes Henri Robillot's 1979 translation of Philip Roth's The Professor of Desire (1977) into French. It demonstrates the manner in which apparently minor stylistic choices, slight omissions, and more generally the stylistic treatment of male and female characters in the translation constitute a strategy of excessive interpretation and gender politics traced back to the critical reception of Roth's work. Through the analysis of the translation, the article aims to improve the analytical perception of the novel.

Doppelgänger narratives of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries relate in different and sometimes incompatible ways to their Romantic precursors. They often parody these precursor narratives, criticize their popular interpretations, or tinker with their conventions. Some of them follow the Romantic tradition in highlighting the harsh rivalry between "original" and double and its catastrophic results, whereas in others the double acts as a catalyst for self-reflection and selftransformation. Doppelgänger narratives of the last decades tend to focus on the intersection of the psychological with the scientific or the aesthetic domains, while the significance of the supernatural principle is reduced, eliminated, or replaced by implausible coincidences and analogical relations typical of (post)modern fiction. In order to demonstrate these ideas, the article begins with an analysis of E. T. A. Hoffmann's The Devil's Elixir (1815-1816) and continues with an exploration of five types of later Doppelgänger narratives.

In Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr, Sartre tells the story of the writer Jean Genet. He does it from the presuppositions he developed in his major philosophical book, Being and Nothingness, where he presented man as a free being acting in specific situations but always able to surmount the given by decisions of his own. Nevertheless, Sartre describes the story of the orphan Genet as it begins in childhood with the accusation of theft made by his adopted parents and by the adults of the village where he had been sent. This accusation turns out to be traumatic. Genet will actually become a thief later, and a writer of theft and crime. It thus determines his entire life. By telling this story, Sartre himself puts his basic ideas to the test, and has to admit that events which occurred in childhood influence and determine our life. Sartre the philosopher of freedom is thus challenged by Sartre the writer of existence.

In recent years, literary critics and theorists have turned increasingly toward cognitive science for models, including in discussions of literary style. More than is usually recognized, such an approach recalls the "affective stylistics" developed by Stanley Fish in the 1970s - a similarity evident in the heavy use both theories make of the term "information." The assumptions behind the use of this term, however, are deeply misleading. "Information" implies that styles are parcels or propositions rather than expressions of attitude, and invokes a causal vocabulary that fails to capture how texts convey moods and communicate ideas. More plausible models of understanding can be culled from Donald Davidson's account of Mrs. Malaprop and Ludwig Wittgenstein's descriptions of "seeing-as." Avoiding the twin temptations of skepticism and dogmatism, these discussions suggest that cognitivist and affective theories are logically dependent on the practices of actually existing readers, whose engagements with style are at times effortless and at times full of confusion. Styles are not discrete objects, as the language of "information" implies, and understanding them demands a complex training and historically variable set of skills, sometimes referred to as know-how and wit.

The article discusses the problems that faced the English translator of Balys Sruoga's Forest of the Gods, a book written immediately after World War II and based on the author's experience as a prisoner in the Stutthof concentration camp. The article shows that, largely owing to the translator's choices in rendering culture-specific concepts and expressions, the original and the translation may acquire different kinds of standing in the literary-historical process.

The article examines one of the problems of translating Philip Roth's novel Deception into Polish. In the novel, written entirely in dialogues, the speakers are not defined as regards their identity, including their gender. This device contributes to the novel's theme of deception and ventriloquism: all the voices in the novel, no matter how diverse, belong ultimately to the writer as their sole creator. The translator should leave the dialogues untagged, otherwise the meaningful indeterminacy of the text is lost. This, however, proves impossible in the Polish translation, since the Polish language is gendered, and the Polish translator has to disambiguate the text, deciding who makes what utterances in the dialogue. In doing so the translator has to follow clichéd preconceptions about gender or, on the contrary, subvert them. In both cases, what in the source text is left ambiguous and indeterminate becomes concretized and determinate in the process of translation.

June 2013: Jerzy Jarniewicz  (b. 1958 in Lowicz) is a Polish poet, translator, and literary critic, who lectures in English at the universities of Lodz and Warsaw. He has published twelve volumes of poetry and nine critical books on contemporary Irish, British, and American literature. He has written extensively for various journals, including Poetry Review, Irish Review, and Cambridge Review. His poetry has been translated into many languages and presented in international magazines, including Index on Censorship, Paris Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Oxford Poetry, and Poetry Wales; it has also appeared in The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry (1999). He is editor of the literary monthly Literatura na Swiecie (Warsaw) and has translated the work of many novelists and poets, including James Joyce, John Banville, Seamus Heaney, Raymond Carver, Philip Roth, Edmund White, Derek Walcott, and Craig Raine. His most recent work is the anthology Six Irish Women Poets. In 1999 he attended International Writers Program in Iowa, in 2006 he was writer-in-residence at Farmleigh, Dublin, and in 2010 he won the Ireland Literature Exchange bursary for literary translators. 

Waiting and expecting structurally presuppose a futurity conditioned by doubt and uncertainty about the object of the wait. But what can waiting signify when one no longer waits for something/someone to come in a determinable future or when the horizon of such a traditional form of waiting starts receding? This paper attempts to frame this problem within a "dialectical" reading of Beckett's play Waiting for Godot, starting from the existential-temporal dimension of humanity's Dasein as "destined-to-death," which traces the limits of waiting with/for an end as the time of the always missed/deferred encounter with Godot, symbolizing the ultimate appointment with death. As the play unfolds, the main characters may be seen to approach, albeit unwittingly, the threshold of another, more objectless waiting: that of Derrida's arrivant or waiting without (messianic) expectation in a future-to-come (avenir). Finally, after a detour via Blanchot's own modes of waiting and, as a possible remedy, the form of negation known as forgetting (Awaiting Oblivion), it returns to the ultimate inescapability of waiting beyond the "end" of Beckett's play and, following Abraham and Torok's speculative endeavor to write a "Sixth Act" in order to put to rest the dramatic uncertainties of Hamlet, it attempts to imagine a "third act," once the curtain has fallen on Beckett's characters.