Multiculturalism, Multilingualism and the Self: Literature and Culture Studies

Leszek Drong is an Associate Professor at the Institute of English Cultures and Literatures at the University of Silesia, Katowice, Poland. He is the Head of the Department of Rhetoric in Culture and the Media and Director of the Centre for the Study of Minor Cultures. His major publications include: Disciplining the New Pragmatism: Theory, Rhetoric and the Ends of Literary Study (Peter Lang Verlag 2006) and Masks and Icons: Subjectivity in Post-Nietzschean Autobiography (Peter Lang Verlag 2001) as well as numerous essays concerned with autobiography, rhetoric, New Pragmatism (particularly Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish) and Irish fiction (James Joyce, Flann O’Brien, Sebastian Barry, Robert McLiam Wilson).Jacek Mydla is an Associate Professor at the Institute of English Cultures and Literatures, University of Silesia, Katowice, Poland. He holds an MA in Philosophy from the Catholic University of Lublin and an MA in English from the University of Silesia, as well as a PhD anda post-doctoral degree in literary studies. He conducts research and lectures on the history of British literature, specifically Gothic fiction and drama, and theory of narrative. His book-length publications are: The Dramatic Potential of Time in Shakespeare (2002), Spectres of Shakespeare (2009), and The Shakespearean Tide (2012). Forthcoming is a book on the ghost stories of M.R. James. His current research interests include Romantic drama, British empiricism in the eighteenth century, and the uncanny and supernatural in fiction. Małgorzata Poks, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of English Cultures and Literatures, University of Silesia, Katowice, Poland. Her main interests concern spirituality, civil disobedience, Christian anarchism, contemporary US literature, US-Mexican border writing, and animal and environmental studies. She is the recipient of several international fellowships and has published widely in Poland and abroad. Her book Thomas Merton and Latin America: A Consonance of Voices was awarded the “Louie” by the International Thomas Merton Society.

• Fear of Multilingualism and the Uses of Nostalgia in Ivan Vladislavić’s The Restless Supermarket.- The Self Between “Two Incongruous and Incompatible Cultures” in Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky.- Kazuo Ishiguro’s Buried Giant as a Contemporary Revision of Medieval Tropes.- Multiculturalism, the Foreign and Early Gothic Novels.- The House Sofi Built: Critique of Multiculturalism and Christian Patriarchy in Ana Castillo’s So Far From God.