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4 books match the query 'Paloff, Benjamin'
Bakhtin’s Adventure
An Essay on Life without MeaningBenjamin Paloff
Northwestern University Press, 2025
A century after Mikhail Bakhtin first began formulating his now-canonical reflections on freedom and literary representation, we often seem as confused as ever about the relationship between narrative form and what it means to live ethically. Focusing on the throughline of adventure in Bakhtin’s thought, we find a peculiar, yet no less ethically urgent challenge: not to imagine the literary hero as if they were a real person but to recognize how we are always imagining real people as if they were literary characters. This is a provocation with far-reaching consequences for how we understand ourselves, each other, and our situatedness in space and time.
In Bakhtin’s Adventure: An Essay on Life without Meaning, Benjamin Paloff argues that the major aesthetic, ethical, and sociological threads of Bakhtin’s thought intersect in his concept of adventure. Reading across a wide variety of media, from classic literature to contemporary film, Paloff demonstrates how, for Bakhtin and his interlocutors, the test of human freedom is whether narrative means nothing beyond its own adventure. Reframed in this light, Bakhtin’s most influential ideas (eventness, chronotope, heteroglossia, polyphony, carnival) form a cohesive model for how to maintain ethical relations in a world where we can never really know each other the way we know ourselves.
Lost in the Shadow of the Word
Space, Time, and Freedom in Interwar Eastern EuropeBenjamin Paloff
Northwestern University Press, 2016
Scholars of modernism have long addressed how literature, painting, and music reflected the radical reconceptualization of space and time in the early twentieth century—a veritable revolution in both physics and philosophy that has been characterized as precipitating an “epistemic trauma” around the world. In this wide-ranging study, Benjamin Paloff contends that writers in Central and Eastern Europe felt this impact quite distinctly from their counterparts in Western Europe. For the latter, the destabilization of traditional notions of space and time inspired works that saw in it a new kind of freedom. However, for many Central and Eastern European authors, who were writing from within public discourses about how to construct new social realities, the need for escape met the realization that there was both nowhere to escape to and no stable delineation of what to escape from. In reading the prose and poetry of Czech, Polish, and Russian writers, Paloff imbues the term “Kafkaesque” with a complexity so far missing from our understanding of this moment in literary history.
The Career of Nicodemus Dyzma
A NovelTadeusz Dolega-Mostowicz; Translated from the Polish by Ewa Malachowska-Pasek and Megan Thomas and with an introduction by Benjamin Paloff
Northwestern University Press, 2020
Winner of the 2021 Found in Translation Award
First published in Polish in 1932, The Career of Nicodemus Dyzma was Tadeusz Dołęga-Mostowicz’s breakout novel. Dyzma is an unemployed clerk who crashes a swanky party, where he makes an offhand crass remark that sets him on a new course. Soon high society—from government ministers to drug-fueled aristocrats—wants a piece of him. As Dyzma’s status grows, his vulgarity is interpreted as authenticity and strength. He is unable to comprehend complicated political matters, but his cryptic responses are celebrated as wise introspection. His willingness to do anything to hold on to power—flip-flopping on political positions, inventing xenophobic plots, even having enemies assaulted—only leads to greater success.
Dołęga-Mostowicz wrote his novel in a newly independent Poland rampant with political corruption and populist pandering. Jerzy Kosinski borrowed heavily from the novel when he wrote Being There, and readers of both books will recognize similarities between their plots. This biting political satire—by turns hilarious and disturbing, contemptuous and sympathetic—is an indictment of a system in which money and connections matter above all else, bluster and ignorance are valorized, and a deeply incompetent man rises to the highest spheres of government.
Tworki
Marek Bienczyk
Northwestern University Press, 2008
In Tworki, a village just southwest of Warsaw, there is a psychiatric hospital and in that hospital, the patients and their caretakers are hidden from the war just outside their iron gates. Our hero, Jurek, answers an ad in the paper for a job there and finds himself keeping the books alongside a knockout strawberry blonde named Sonia. They and their group of friends—vital young people like Marcel, an initial rival for Jurek; Olek, Sonia’s chosen love; and Janka, with whom Jurek becomes involved—do their jobs, picnic on the weekends, and dance in the gardens on the grounds of the hospital. Jurek speaks often of, and even in, verse, whether he is talking to his friends or in letters to a distant and admiring cousin. He and his friends live lives that defy the discord and destruction of the war in Europe, striving to rediscover or save whatever beauty they can. Much of this beauty is embodied by Sonia, who is beloved of all the friends and patients at the asylum. But the revitalizing spring they all hope will come for Poland is not to arrive this year. Despite the relative safety of their odd surroundings, the world and the war soon come for the friends. Olek’s absences are longer and unexplained. Marcel is not what he seems, and he and his wife mysteriously disappear, she says, to the gas. And the perfection that Sonia embodies cannot ultimately be kept, by the friends, by the nation, or even by Sonia herself.