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.

During the decades following the pioneering work of authors such as Walter Benjamin or Maurice Halbwachs in the 1920s and 1930s, it has become increasingly common to refer to memory as a source not only of personal identity or of the identity of small groups but also of large collectivities. In recent years an ever growing number of studies in a variety of disciplines employ the concept of collective memory. Using the example of an episode from Chateaubriand's Mémoires d'outre tombe, this paper investigates the meaning of this concept in the methodological perspective of philosophy and the role of imagination in collectively remembered, communicable experience. It aims to elucidate the way in which collective memory might be demarcated from constructs of the imagination, above all in the public sphere.

The article discusses the German-Jewish author and philosopher Margarete Susman (1872-1966) and her interpretation of cultural Zionism around the First World War. Susman has largely disappeared from our cultural canvas in spite of the fact that she is one of the rare thinkers in German philosophical tradition for whom the challenge of idealism lies in its potential conversion into reality, and the force of beauty in its undeniable ethical appeal. In 1916 Margarete Susman wrote an extensive article in the Frankfurter Zeitung on the Zionist philosophy of Ahad Ha'am and Martin Bubber. Although the cultural journalist and former poet from the wider circle around Stefan George had already reflected on the question of Jewish identity in Germany in previous years, her strong interest in Zionism cannot just be explained by a sudden awareness of her Jewish descent. The 1916 article reveals a remarkable interpretation of cultural Zionism as a spiritual movement that is the real foundation of all political thought and any state. It has its roots in her belief in the meaning of spirit and art as truly regenerating forces, a belief she did not lose in spite of fact that she never turned a blind eye to the brutal reality of her time.

Analyzing how mid- to late-nineteenth-century Bildungsromane as well as scientific and philosophical texts conceive of society and the process of socialization, this essay supplements existing studies of Victorian liberalism and the British concept of "character" as Bildung. It traces the interest in the body and physiological processes - the nexus of biology and society that Bildungsromane have always been concerned with, while also emphasizing the nineteenth-century tension between voluntarism and determinism that was partly resolved in favour of scientific materialism and biological determinism at the fin-de-siècle. Concentrating on how three related areas of nineteenth-century biological research and thinking - the science of anthropometry, physiological theories of habit formation, and the ideas of organic memory and degeneration - are represented, subverted, or reimagined in Bildungsromane and Anti-Bildungsromane by, among others, Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, the essay suggests that social stratification, a vision of society as fragmented into distinct social classes, is at the core of these mid- to late-nineteenth-century novels of development and their negotiation - and subversion - of cultural and biological models of individual and collective identity. Special emphasis is given throughout to the novels' representative strategy of differential embodiment.

The relations between literature and the political community have figured prominently on the research agenda in the humanities in the last few decades. The tension between political power and its different rhetorical and literary figurations can be productively explored by focusing on the juncture of two prominent nineteenth-century discourses: those relying on notions of Bildung (a term capturing processes of self-development and organic growth) and the state (which often denotes those aspects of power that cannot be couched in a naturalizing rhetoric of the nation or, indeed, Bildung). This forum traces the mobilization of figures of Bildung for the legitimation of political power in the paradigmatic genre of the Bildungsroman as well as in novelistic, biological, utopian, architectural, educational, and journalistic discourses.

Reading a narrative text is or provides an experience. In this article, I attempt to reconcile this common claim about reading with the intentionalist model of narrative David Herman has presented in his "Narrative Theory and the Intentional Stance" (2008). I do so by developing two lines of argument. First, taking my cue from Daniel D. Hutto's philosophy of mind, I argue that two organisms can participate in a joint attention scene only if they are capable of sharing an experience. Thus, if we endorse Herman's view that, through narrative texts, authors draw readers' attention to some features of a storyworld, we must also account for how authors and readers can share an experience. I deal with this problem by tracing a (primarily heuristic) distinction between basic, embodied experience and linguistic, conceptual experience. At the level of basic experiential responding, I draw on psycholinguistic research to argue that both the production and the reception of narrative texts are grounded in embodied simulations. At the linguistically mediated level, I apply Dennett's conception of consciousness as a "Joycean machine" to the experiences provided by narratives, adding that these experiences can be shared by authors and readers because they are narratively constructed. Second, I address the question of interpretation, which I distinguish from both the understanding of linguistic meaning and the reconstruction of the storyworld: interpretation is concerned with the "aboutness" of a work, and touches on what Stein Haughom Olsen (1987) has called the "human interest" questions. It is because of its openness to human experience that interpretation cannot be fully subsumed under the intentionalist model of our engagement with stories. At this level, readers are not required to comply with the author's instructions: they are free to relate the experience they have undergone while reading a story to their own past experiences, and draw their conclusions as to what the story is "about." This is why the experientiality of stories - i.e. the experiential "feel" they create - can be said to bridge the gap between Herman's intentionalist model and interpretation. Thus the reader would be able to become a coparticipant and cosufferer of the experience through which the novelist is passing.

The abyss, the German Abgrund, is a recurring concept and motif which Paul Celan addresses in both his poetics and poetry. The abyss-like quality of Celan's poetry did not emerge unheralded, but the Abgrund topos has been little researched. This paper argues that in Celan Abgrund functions as both a thematic image and textual practice. The Abgrund topos is motivated by rich allusions to Celan's literary sources. Celan's abysses have a paradoxical twofold function. On the one hand the abyss is an ultimate end-point in which significance and value are doomed to collapse; on the other hand, building on that non-foundation is the source of Celan's poetic craft.