Volume 67, Issue 4

Conrad’s story “The Planter of Malata,” by focusing on the portrayal of Geoffrey Renouard, addresses the dilemmas of the modern self implicated in the subjectivist mode of experiencing the world. Heidegger’s reinterpretation of the Cartesian ego and his conceptualization of modern subjectivity provide a theoretical framework for clarifying the paradox of Renouard’s position which involves both demonstrations of mastery and gestures of submission in his interactions with Felicia Moorsom. The paper examines how the subject construes the world as representation and reduces the world to the object to be manipulated and controlled. Renouard’s experience of irrational desire and his loss of mastery, which lead to the collapse of the subject/object duality and the dissolution of representation, dismantle the project of the omnipotent ego. Eventually, the breakdown of the ego engenders a growing paralysis of will, enhances the lure of death-like stasis and culminates in Renouard’s suicide.

This essay examines the impostor trope within the works of Charles Dickens, focusing on the example of Josiah Bounderby, the villain of Hard Times (1854), in particular. As a product of the Victorian age’s obsession with character-building and the spirit of industriousness as epitomised in the work of Samuel Smiles, Bounderby not only embodies much of what Dickens found objectionable about utilitarian thought but also a number of tropes that were and remain crucial to the cultural imaginary of the United States (even though Hard Times only briefly alludes to America). As a charismatic rogue who tinkers with his own biography, Bounderby foreshadows the coming of the impostor in turn-of-the-century European literature, an aspect of Hard Times that has so far been overlooked in critical accounts of the novel.

The article analyzes three little-known films from the early 1930s which are based on novels by British crime thriller writer Edgar Wallace. It presents the films and their genre as a case study for crime cinema and politics in the transition from the Weimar Republic to Nazi Germany by contextualizing them within the rapidly changing film market after January 1933. The series of popular Weimar Wallace films ended abruptly with Hitler’s rise to power, which also put a stop to most of the country’s transnational cinema practices, including film adaptations of novels which were then considered as un-German.

This essay examines how Kazuo Ishiguro’s narrators – namely, those of his novels An Artist of the Floating World , The Remains of the Day , and Never Let Me Go – are all variations of one central theme: the authoritarian personality. By drawing on the findings of the eponymous study by Theodor W. Adorno et al., it analyses the role of the narrators’ respective upbringings in the formation of their authoritarian predisposition as well as how their authoritarian tendencies later manifest themselves in their conduct. The way these tendencies – or the limitations imposed by them on the narrators’ imagination – also manifest themselves aesthetically in the narrative discourse further allows a comparison to Hannah Arendt’s analysis of Adolf Eichmann in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil .

This paper explores the possibilities of introducing contemporary Canadian texts into a Polish university classroom. It contextualizes teaching English language literature in Poland as well as seeks options for promoting values such as openness and tolerance while facilitating global reading and raising students’ awareness on global conflicts and their meaning in the contemporaneous world. The paper aims at demonstrating that Canadian literature courses composed of texts concerned with immigration and multiculturalism turn out to have an enormous potential in creating valuable debates on the problem of embracing otherness, seeking bridges in mutual understanding, and promoting openness towards different identities. On the basis of close readings of three texts, M. Ondaatje’s The English Patient , A.J. Borkowski’s Copernicus Avenue , and E. Stachniak’s Necessary Lies , the present article also demonstrates how Canadian literature enriches and rescales students’ perception of cultural heterogeneity and responsibility of reading, thus offering new perspectives on the rapidly changing world.