Wieslaw Krajka – författare

This study illuminates various aspects of the relationship between Joseph Conrad's literary work and his roots in Polish and East-Central European culture. In particular, it examines various aspects of Conrad's relationship to Poland-the evolution of his attitude toward his homeland, the influence of Polish literature on his work, his reception by Polish audiences-and to Russian literature, particularly Dostoevsky and Turgenev. This volume collects fourteen essays by scholars from the United States, Europe and beyond. It is critically diverse, containing elements of biography, psychoanalysis, film criticism, comparative literature, and sociological and philosophical interpretation. The scope of critical materials is equally wide-ranging: from considerations of Conrad's life and political attitudes to overviews of his entire oeuvre and focused studies of single literary works.

Thirteen contributors from a variety of backgrounds tackle the use of irony, contrast, narrative, themes of belonging, Englishness, imperialism, portrayals of women, and conceptions of truth and evil as they were expressed in the work of Joseph Conrad. Wieslaw Krajka expands Conrad criticism to explore the modernist's mastery of literary technique and his contribution to visions of humanity. Krajka's collection opens with two essays that explore the identity of Conrad, his characters, and his narrators, and then engages with the ideology, philosophy, and ethics of Conrad's fiction, especially the balance he strikes between literary technique and the meanings those techniques convey.

The literary studies comprised in nineteenth volume of the "Conrad: Eastern and Western Perspectives" series, compare fact v. fiction/non-fiction, ideas, literary works, translations, literature and film. The works by Joseph Conrad analyzed in this volume comprise Almayer's Folly, "Heart of Darkness", "Amy Foster", Under Western Eyes, "Prince Roman", Conrad's non-fictional writings and his entire literary output. The variety of studies in reception of Conrad's works comprise a comprehensive factual survey of reception in one country and various types of creative reception: literary, translatory, artistic inspiration and influence, filmic. The reception sub-cluster shows various types of works of art in which Conradian patterns have been received: mostly literary prose, but also drama and theatricality, non-fictional prose, film.The volume presents not only various kinds of literary studies in the strict sense of the word but also those of the disciplines of humanities bordering on them, such as biography, studies in politics, history, axiology, filmic studies, translation studies and even remote ones (navigation studies).The great variety of issues of biography, politics, literature and reception considered here - as related to Conrad and to various Polish and East-Central European matters and contexts - hopefully comprises innovatory considerations by either taking up new issues or significantly reinterpreting old ones.

The volume opens with an appreciation of Conrad's Polishness by Jerzy Buzek, The President of the European Parliament. Its first section provides new illuminations of Polishness in Conrad's personality and oeuvre: from the szlachta cultural heritage of his ancestors and Polish contextualizations of "Prince Roman" through some aspects of the writer's identity and references to Polish culture and autobiographical elements in his works to their Polish translations and reception. The Eastern-Western frame for these studies is provided by insights into some relations of his literary works to Russian literature (Dostoevsky, Turgenev) and their reception in Ukraine and Germany. The essays represent various methodological approaches to studies in biography, historical-cultural contextualizations of literature, fact-and-fiction relationships, history of ideas, literary reception (documented surveys, translative and creative reception) and comparative literary criticism.

This book paints the landscape of major trends and achievements of studies in Anglophone literatures in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Slovenia and Ukraine. The book shows which tendencies in these investigations are common to all these former Communist countries and which are specific to any of them, which ones and to what extent are shared with global research in the field. The material presented covers the periods before WW II, from 1939-45 to the "autumn of nations" in 1989, and after that caesura, with concentration on the most recent years. The sequence of the essays is from comprehensive surveys of the entire field of investigations through evaluative presentation of some of the main and most influential publications to evaluation of academic system and methods of teaching literatures in English. The surveys are focussed on both the major tendencies and the particular phenomena illustrating them, and combine manifestations of studies in literatures in English with contexts external to them (including political ones). They display a variety and wealth of the issues studied, of the critical approaches, schools and areas of research against the changing canon of English literature in the XX century, especially of contemporary literature.

Joseph Conrad’s Authorial Self is organized around the category of the author with some illuminating aspects of Conrad’s Polishness as the major area of consideration. It starts with a theoretical treatment of Conrad’s authorship, continues through a focus on autobiography along with his creative process, proceeds with analyses of his ideas derived from his Polish heritage as presented in his personality and oeuvre, and moves on to biographies of the writer’s relatives. This set is followed by papers on “Amy Foster,” a short story of strong Polish resonance and a classic of émigré literature, considerations of translations of his works into Polish, and essays on central/south-central Europe and the sea.The main integrative concept of authorial self is supported by two secondary principles: delimitation by the geographical area covered: mainly Poland, but also Russia and central and south-central Europe, and the chronology of Joseph Conrad’s life and works, from influences upon Konradek in Lwów and the significance of East Carpathian poetics to juxtapositions of his oeuvre with early twentieth century authors as well as a contemporary Polish author and translations of his works. The final five papers span the whole period studied in this volume, from the first Polish translation published in 1897 to one of the most recent in 2011, from possible influences upon Conrad in his childhood and youth to the most recent reception of his works in the Balkans.This book is volume 27 of the series Conrad: Eastern and Western Perspectives, edited by Wiesław Krajka.

This monograph brings together studies that deal with various aspects of Joseph Conrad’s literary art. The core concept organizing its structure is intertextuality. Intertextual relationships are seen in terms of either affinities/points of contact and the influence of earlier literary works upon his oeuvre or the influence of Conrad’s texts upon literary works by authors following him. Each such relationship is understood as a chord that is vibrant and resonates with new meanings that emerge from the juxtaposition of literary works by Conrad with those by other artists; these new meanings add additional value and significance to Conrad’s literary art.The papers create a truly international constellation of criticism, with their authors affiliated at universities in France, United Kingdom, Turkey, India, Japan, and Poland. The papers apply various types of comparative treatment of Joseph Conrad’s texts: to juxtapose them with literary works by other authors, with specimens of a literary genre, with texts of other fine arts, with aesthetic, philosophical, and ideological tendencies of the epoch. They apply a diverse range of perspectives to Conrad’s literary art, its intertexts, and contexts. The book is a tribute to the literary artistry of Conrad’s literary output, to its tremendous and inexhaustible semantic and artistic potential to be further explored.

This collection of studies examines the various types and uses of ideas of ”the other” and othering in Joseph Conrad’s fiction. It offers examinations of different aspects of the colonial other both in Africa and Latin America, including a personal reminiscence of American imperialism by a descendant of a character mentioned in Conrad’s fiction.The first three papers offer insights into Conrad’s artistic presentation of both the historical and concrete side of capitalism and imperialism as well as the universal aspects of these social-political-economic formations. The next four studies theorize the colonial other, from European/Western perspectives and from Third World perspectives. The final four papers concern otherness in seamanship, in terms of the imperial other and alterity, and the female as other, othering by gender.The dimensions of the other in Conrad’s fiction that the collection examines are mainly colonial, imperial, and civilizational, set in the realities of geographical space of Africa, Latin America, and the Far East, the reality at sea, and the reality of gendered humanity. They are grounded in various contexts significant for Conrad’s epoch: both domestic and pertaining to English and European colonial-imperial overseas expansion, and illuminated from both English/Western and Third World perspectives.Various Dimensions of the Other in Joseph Conrad’s Fiction features both general theoretical arguments and distinctive methodological approaches to Conrad’s oeuvre, such as historical contextualization and source studies, postcolonial theory, imagology, Levinas’s theory of alterity, the Lacanian theory of jouissance, literary feminism, and personal narrative.The book is volume 29 of the series Conrad: Eastern and Western Perspectives: within this series it offers the first complex and direct treatment of multifarious incarnations of the other in Joseph Conrad’s fiction.The studies included create a truly international constellation of criticism, with authors at universities in the United States of America, France, Switzerland, Ukraine, Algeria, Iran, Japan, and Poland. Owing to their unique national and cultural-literary backgrounds and perspectives upon Joseph Conrad’s oeuvre, Various Dimensions of the Other in Joseph Conrad’s Fiction continues and strengthens the transnational profile of the series Conrad: Eastern and Western Perspectives.

Despite the large number of publications on Joseph Conrad’s Polishness—including previous volumes of the series Conrad: Eastern and Western Perspectives—many questions remain. New Insights Into Conrad and Poland, edited by Wiesław Krajka, brings together a variety of thematic and methodological approaches in search of new insights. After the opening chapter, which comments on Polishness as studied in previous volumes of this series, contributions examine the life of Conrad and members of his close family; Conrad’s literary works in relation to Polish literature; Polish reception of his oeuvre, including adaptations and educational influence, as translations, as works of art, and in schools and popular culture; the Polish Jewish experience; and exilic feelings. The coda of the volume is a study that presents a view of Russia as antithetical to Polishness. Essays range across traditional biographical criticism, literary analysis and interpretation, comparison of Conrad’s literary works and their intertextual study with those by other authors and with other works of art, translation and adaptation studies, investigations of reception of literature and popular culture, archetypal criticism, and philosophical criticism. The book is volume 33 of the series Conrad: Eastern and Western Perspectives, edited by Wiesław Krajka.CONTRIBUTORS: Wiesław Krajka, Lilia Omelan, Karol Samsel, Daniel Vogel, Ewa Kujawska-Lis, Olga Binczyk, Mirosława Buchholtz, Agnieszka Adamowicz-Pośpiech, James Mellor, John G. Peters.