Benjamin Paloff
Biographic Data
| ID | 1554501 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Benjamin Paloff |
| GIVEN NAMES | Benjamin |
| FAMILY NAME | Paloff |
| SIGNATURE | PALOFF B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Michigan |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8461-2431 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 13 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Polish Jewish Re-Remembering
Do You Exist, Mr. Lem
Throughout his career, Stanisław Lem revisits the problem of “persistency of identity,” asking whether two instantiations of the same thing can ever be determined to be entirely the same or independent from each other. In this article, I consider several instances in which Lem sets up fictional or analytic thought experiments to probe the persistence of identity and our strategies for testing it, with particular attention to his novel Solaris and…
The Cosmic Signals of Stanisław Lem
Communicating productively with an alien intelligence, whether by traveling through space to another civilization or attempting to understand their messages received here on Earth, is so consistent a commonplace of cosmic science fiction that we might easily regard it as a defining feature of the genre. This essay argues, by contrast, that Stanisław Lem's fiction about space travel aims consistently to demonstrate the impossibility of such commun…
Bauman
In considering Izabela Wagner's hefty biography of the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, I find it helpful to distinguish between life writing produced by literary biographers—writers who demonstrate fluency in that particular narrative genre—and those written by specialists working in the same field as their biographical subjects. For the literary biographer, the story is paramount, so that every detail earns its place in the telling by advancing or c…
Sketches in the Theory of Culture
Dariusz Brzeziński opens and closes his introduction to Zygmunt Bauman's Sketches in the Theory of Culture by comparing this long-lost book to a message in a bottle, borrowing Bauman's own definition of the metaphor from Liquid Life (2005) as implying “a message fit to be written down” and “still worthy of the finder's effort to unpack it and study it” (p. vii). The comparison is imprecise. Bauman's recovered text, which first appeared in Polish …
Cold to the Cold War
Olga Tokarczuk
This article argues that the loose plotting and wide-ranging digressions that characterize Olga Tokarczuk’s fiction, and that many readers have noted as a challenge to their own expectations, are integral features of the discourse model that most of her work employs, namely, a telling in which the narrator is not entirely certain why he or she is speaking in the first place. By adapting the discourse model of the psychotherapeutic encounter, Toka…
Przekłady poetyckie wszystkie [Complete Poetic Translations]
Book Review| July 01 2018 Przekłady poetyckie wszystkie [Complete Poetic Translations] Czesław Miłosz, Przekłady poetyckie wszystkie [Complete Poetic Translations], edited by Magda Heydel (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Znak, 2015), 845 pp. ISBN 978–83-240-3481-9. Benjamin Paloff Benjamin Paloff University of Michigan Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Polish Review (2018) 63 (2): 117–119. https://doi.org/10.5406/polishreview.63.…
The Kingdom of Insignificance
Book Review| April 01 2018 The Kingdom of Insignificance: Miron Białoszewski and the Quotidian, the Queer, and the Traumatic Joanna Niżyńska, The Kingdom of Insignificance: Miron Białoszewski and the Quotidian, the Queer, and the Traumatic, (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2013). 276 pp., bibliography, index. ISBN 978-08-101-2846-0. Benjamin Paloff Benjamin Paloff University of Michigan Search for other works by this author on:…
East Is Always Further East
This article comments on the problematic uses of East–West rhetoric in Anglo-American academia, literary culture, and popular media more generally. Of special interest to the author is how the cultural cachet of an Eastern European origin offered émigré writers a readymade audience in the last decades of the Cold War, and how these same writers then used this attention to redefine Eastern Europe, and in such a way that would exclude them from it.…
The God Function in Joseph Brodsky and Olga Sedakova
Benjamin Paloff, The God Function in Joseph Brodsky and Olga Sedakova, The Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 51, No. 4, Special Forum Issue: At the Edge of Heaven: Russian Poetry since 1970 (Winter, 2007), pp. 716-736
Wojna polsko-ruska pod flagą biało-czerwoną
Twelve Stories of Russia
East Is Always Further East
This article comments on the problematic uses of East–West rhetoric in Anglo-American academia, literary culture, and popular media more generally. Of special interest to the author is how the cultural cachet of an Eastern European origin offered émigré writers a readymade audience in the last decades of the Cold War, and how these same writers then used this attention to redefine Eastern Europe, and in such a way that would exclude them from it.…
Twelve Stories of Russia
Wojna polsko-ruska pod flagą biało-czerwoną
The God Function in Joseph Brodsky and Olga Sedakova
Benjamin Paloff, The God Function in Joseph Brodsky and Olga Sedakova, The Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 51, No. 4, Special Forum Issue: At the Edge of Heaven: Russian Poetry since 1970 (Winter, 2007), pp. 716-736
East Is Always Further East
This article comments on the problematic uses of East–West rhetoric in Anglo-American academia, literary culture, and popular media more generally. Of special interest to the author is how the cultural cachet of an Eastern European origin offered émigré writers a readymade audience in the last decades of the Cold War, and how these same writers then used this attention to redefine Eastern Europe, and in such a way that would exclude them from it.…
Przekłady poetyckie wszystkie [Complete Poetic Translations]
Book Review| July 01 2018 Przekłady poetyckie wszystkie [Complete Poetic Translations] Czesław Miłosz, Przekłady poetyckie wszystkie [Complete Poetic Translations], edited by Magda Heydel (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Znak, 2015), 845 pp. ISBN 978–83-240-3481-9. Benjamin Paloff Benjamin Paloff University of Michigan Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Polish Review (2018) 63 (2): 117–119. https://doi.org/10.5406/polishreview.63.…
The Kingdom of Insignificance
Book Review| April 01 2018 The Kingdom of Insignificance: Miron Białoszewski and the Quotidian, the Queer, and the Traumatic Joanna Niżyńska, The Kingdom of Insignificance: Miron Białoszewski and the Quotidian, the Queer, and the Traumatic, (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2013). 276 pp., bibliography, index. ISBN 978-08-101-2846-0. Benjamin Paloff Benjamin Paloff University of Michigan Search for other works by this author on:…
Cold to the Cold War
Olga Tokarczuk
This article argues that the loose plotting and wide-ranging digressions that characterize Olga Tokarczuk’s fiction, and that many readers have noted as a challenge to their own expectations, are integral features of the discourse model that most of her work employs, namely, a telling in which the narrator is not entirely certain why he or she is speaking in the first place. By adapting the discourse model of the psychotherapeutic encounter, Toka…
Bauman
In considering Izabela Wagner's hefty biography of the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, I find it helpful to distinguish between life writing produced by literary biographers—writers who demonstrate fluency in that particular narrative genre—and those written by specialists working in the same field as their biographical subjects. For the literary biographer, the story is paramount, so that every detail earns its place in the telling by advancing or c…
Sketches in the Theory of Culture
Dariusz Brzeziński opens and closes his introduction to Zygmunt Bauman's Sketches in the Theory of Culture by comparing this long-lost book to a message in a bottle, borrowing Bauman's own definition of the metaphor from Liquid Life (2005) as implying “a message fit to be written down” and “still worthy of the finder's effort to unpack it and study it” (p. vii). The comparison is imprecise. Bauman's recovered text, which first appeared in Polish …
Do You Exist, Mr. Lem
Throughout his career, Stanisław Lem revisits the problem of “persistency of identity,” asking whether two instantiations of the same thing can ever be determined to be entirely the same or independent from each other. In this article, I consider several instances in which Lem sets up fictional or analytic thought experiments to probe the persistence of identity and our strategies for testing it, with particular attention to his novel Solaris and…
The Cosmic Signals of Stanisław Lem
Communicating productively with an alien intelligence, whether by traveling through space to another civilization or attempting to understand their messages received here on Earth, is so consistent a commonplace of cosmic science fiction that we might easily regard it as a defining feature of the genre. This essay argues, by contrast, that Stanisław Lem's fiction about space travel aims consistently to demonstrate the impossibility of such commun…
Polish Jewish Re-Remembering
History (8 works) · Art (5 works) · Eastern European Communism and Reforms (5 works) · Sociology (5 works) · Linguistics (4 works) · Philosophy (4 works) · Political science (4 works) · Aesthetics (3 works) · Central European Literary Studies (3 works) · Law (3 works)