George Gasyna, Assistant Professor
Contact
Phone: (217) 244-3070
Email: ggasyna@illinois.edu
Office: 3135 FLB, M 10:30-12:30.
Degree
Ph.D., University of Toronto, 2005, Centre for Comparative Literature
Major Interests
Twentieth-century Polish literature; exile and emigration as discourse and as practice; modernism/postmodernism/avant-garde; diasporic and minority cultures; Jewish-Polish relations.
Books
- Polish, Hybrid, and Otherwise: Exilic Discourse in Joseph Conrad and Witold Gombrowicz. New York & London: Continuum, 2011.
- A Time for the Province: Twentieth-Century Polish Borderland Literature. Book project, in progress.
Selected Publications
- “Narrative as Transgression in Witold Gombrowicz’s Kosmos and Michel Houellebecq’s Les Particules élémentaires.” In The Effect of Palimpsest: Culture, Literature, History. Eds. Bożena Shallcross and Ryszard Nycz. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2011, 239-258.
- "Toward Heterotopia: The Case of Trans-Atlantyk." Slavic Review, Vol. 68 (4), Winter 2009, 898-923.
- “The Poetics of the Borderlands: Ryszard Kapuściński’s Poland.” Polish Review, Vol. 53 (1), Spring 2008, 53-72.
- “Rituals at the Limits of Literature. A New Reading of Witold Gombrowicz’s Cosmos.” The Sarmatian Review, Vol. 27 (3), September 2007, 1323-1332.
- “Wyprawa na krańce literatury - nowe spojrzenie na Kosmos.” Kresy: Kwartalnik Literacki, Vol. 3 (67), September 2006, 103-111.
- “Sektor's Suspicions.” In Alphabet City 10: The Suspect. Ed. John Knechtel. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006. 234-40.
- Gombrowicz contra Miłosz: Towards a Poetics of Displacement." In Cross-Cultural Relations and Exile. Ed. Danièle Issa-Sayegh and Salvatore Bancheri. Ottawa: LEGAS Publishing, 2005. 269-78.
- “Inscribing Otherness: Polish-American Writers after the Great Divide.” In Living in Translation: Polish Writers in America. Ed. Halina Stephan. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003. 331-77.
- “Life as Intertext: Distance, Deception and Intentionality in Marek Hłasko’s Killing the Second Dog.” Canadian Slavonic Papers, Vol. 44 (1-2), March-June 2002, 19-37.
- “A Mind Divided: Dual Exile of Czesław Miłosz.” Russian, Croatian and Serbian, Czech and Slovak, Polish Literature, Vol. 52 (4), November 2002, 355-77.
- “Wyrażać odmienność: Pisarze polsko-amerykańscy po okresie wielkiego podziału.” In Życie w przekładzie. Ed. Halina Stephan, Trans. Magda Heydel et al. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2001. 279-307.
Reviews
- Narrating Post/Communism: Colonial Discourse and Europe’s Borderline Civilization, by Nataša Kovačević (London: Routledge, 2008). Slavic Review, Vol. 70 (1), Spring 2011, 184-5.
- Polish Literature from 1918 to 2000: An Anthology, by Michael J. Mikoś (Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2008). Polish Review, Vol. 55 (2), Summer 2010, pp. 242-7.
- Czesław Miłosz et le vingtième siècle, ed. Maria Delaperrière (Paris: Institut d’études slaves and Bibliothèque polonaise de Paris, 2006). Slavic Review, Vol. 67 (2), Summer 2008, 466-7.
- Polish Literature from 1864 to 1918: Realism and Young Poland. An Anthology, by Michael J. Mikos (Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2006). The Sarmatian Review, Vol. 28 (1), January 2008, 1359-61.
- The Look of Architecture, by Witold Rybczynski (New York: Oxford University Press/The New York Public Library, 2001). The Sarmatian Review, Vol. 27 (1), January 2007, 1269-70.
- Through The Poet's Eye: The Travels of Zagajewski, Herbert, and Brodsky, by Bożena Shallcross (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2002). Canadian Slavonic Papers,Vol. 45 (1-2), March-June 2003, 277-80.
Translations
- “Instead of an Introduction” and “A Note”. English translation of “Zamiast wstepu” and “Nota”. In Artur Tanikowski, Eugeniusz Zak. Bilingual Polish-English Edition. Sejny, Poland: The Borderland Foundation, 2003, 9-12.
- “Ars Poetica – Or a Few Casual Comments on the Subject(s) of Writing.” English translation of Paweł Huelle, “Ars Poetica, czyli kilka lużnych uwag na temat – o czym warto pisać.” In Borderland’s ‘Café Europa’ Program for Kosmopolis: An International Literature Festival, Barcelona 2002. Ed. Krzysztof Czyzewski. Sejny, Poland: The Borderland Foundation, 2002, 1-14.
Courses Recently Taught
- CWL 201 Introduction to Comparative Literary Studies I: Comparative Exile
- CWL 202 Literature and Ideas (Marx/Freud/Bakhtin/Barthes/Foucault)
- CWL 581 Modernism and its Aftershocks (graduate seminar)
- POL 115 Introduction to Polish Culture
- POL 245 Introduction to Polish Literature and Civilization
- POL 302 Readings in Polish
- POL 446 Problems in Polish Literature: Émigrés and Exiles, 1791 to 1991
- SLAV 452 Polish and Czech Avant-Gardes (with David Cooper)