This volume, entitled , undertakes the pioneering task of employing the notion of palimpsest in the multi-layered and changing cultural landscape specific to East Central Europe. The multifarious readings presented in the collection, which evolved from a 2009 conference at the University of Chicago, contribute to a critical reframing of the origins, history and theory of the concept of the palimpsest. Beyond being viewed as an epistemological metaphor, the palimpsest reveals its potential to generate and engage a complex network of complementary meanings. The essays included in this collection probe the palimpsest across the ages, as well as in a variety of genres, media, and cultural spheres in order to revise and redefine our present understanding of the concept and its instantiations.

Bo?ena Shallcross, Associate Professor of Polish Literature at the University of Chicago, works in the area of 20th century Polish literature and cultural studies, with a particular focus on the questions of identity and material culture. Ryszard Nycz is Professor at the Faculty of Polish Studies at Jagiellonian University and at the Institute for Literary Research at the Polish Academy of Sciences. He is a literary and cultural theorist whose research interests include anthropology and literature, modernism and postmodernism.

Contents: Bo?ena Shallcross/Ryszard Nycz: An Editorial Preamble – Ryszard Nycz: The Palimpsest and the Spiderweb: Two Dimensions ot the Textualisation of Experience – Justyna Beinek: Inscribing, Engraving, Cutting: The Polish Romantic Album as Palimpsest – Colleen McQuillen: Reading Dostoevsky’s «Gentle Spirit»: Piotr Duma?a’s Kinesthetic Palimpsest and the Politics of Artistic Appropriation – Malynne Sternstein: Christ’s Trials of NATO, or, Graffiti as a Spoliating Palimpsest? – Alfred Thomas: A Stranger in Prague: Writing and the Politics of Identity in Apollinaire, Kafka, and Camus – Tamara Trojanowska: Performing Urban Palimpsest: City, History, and the Perils of Abundance – Micha? Pawe? Markowski: Wiping Out: The Palimpsest, the Subject, and the Art of Forgetting – Agata Bielik-Robson: The Psychic Palimpsest: Freud, Derrida and Bloom on the Textual Metaphor of the Soul – Julia Vaingurt: Indelible Inscriptions: Rewriting the Self in Mandelstam’s «The Egyptian Stamp» – Danuta Ulicka: Who is the Author? – Bo?ena Karwowska: The Holocaust Story as a Palimpsest: The Case of – Jack Hutchens: Transgressions: Palimpsest and the Destruction of Gender and National Identity in Tokarczuk’s – Karen Underhill: Writing in the Third Language: On the Space between Sacred and Profane in Gershom Scholem and Jacqes Derrida – Hanna Gosk: Polish Post-dependent Palimpsests: A Reading of Tadeusz Konwicki and Dorota Mas?owska’s Novels from the Postcolonial Perspective – George Gasyna: Narrative as Transgression in Witold Gombrowicz’s and Michel Houellebecq’s – Tomasz Bilczewski: The Effect of Translation: Palimpsest, Hybrid, and Afterlife – Clare Cavanagh: Polishness as Palimpsest: Czes?aw Mi?osz and the Language of Paradise – Joanna Trzeciak: Self-Translation as Palimpsest in Nabokov’s – Pawe? Mo?cicki: Palimpsest of the Century: Aleksander Wat and the Quest for Utopia. Inhaltsverzeichnis