Reviews/Interviews

Adam Sumera; Wit Pietrzak; Monika Kocot; Fadia Faqir; Maria Assif; Norman Ravvin; Krzysztof Majer

doi:10.2478/v10231-012-0071-6

Authors

Adam Sumera University of Łódź
Wit Pietrzak University of Łódź
Monika Kocot University of Łódź
Fadia Faqir
Maria Assif University of Toronto
Norman Ravvin Concordia University
Krzysztof Majer University of Łódź

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.2478/v10231-012-0071-6

Abstract

Adam Sumera: Capital Ellowen Deeowen: A Review of The Making of London: London in Contemporary Literature by Sebastian Groes (Houndsmills: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2011)

Wit Pietrzak: Deconstruction and Liberation: A Review of Simon Glendinning’s Derrida (New York: Oxford UP, 2011)

Monika Kocot: Authenticity, Transdifference, Survivance: Native American Identity (Un)Masked: A Review of Native Authenticity: Transnational Perspectives on Native American Literary Studies, ed. Deborah L. Madsen (Albany: State U of New York P, 2010)

Fadia Faqir Speaks with Maria Assif: Literature, the Arab Diaspora, Gender and Politics

Norman Ravvin Talks to Krzysztof Majer: Absent Fathers, Outsider Perspectives and Yiddish Typewriters

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Author Biographies

Adam Sumera, University of Łódź

Adam Sumera is a senior lecturer at the Department of British Literature and Culture, University of Łódź. His publications include Muriel Spark’s Novels (Łódź University Press, 1996), “Intertextuality in Literary Translation” in Translation and Meaning, eds. Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk and Marcel Thelen (Maastricht, 2002), “Ian McEwan’s The Innocent: The Novel and the Movie” in Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies, 21.2, 2010.

Wit Pietrzak, University of Łódź

Wit Pietrzak teaches in the Department of British Literature and Culture, University of Łódź. He wrote his PhD on the poetry of W.B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot, later published as Myth, Language and Tradition (Cambridge Scholars, 2011). Pietrzak has written on modernist and recent British and American poetry as well as on the philosophy and theory of literature. He is working on a book on J.H. Prynne and the idea of the subject in late modernity.

Monika Kocot, University of Łódź

Monika Kocot is a doctoral student in the Department of British Literature and Culture, University of Łódź. She holds MA degrees in Polish and English Studies. Her main research area is British and Polish contemporary poetry seen through the prism of theory and philosophy of literature. She has published articles on the relation of ethics and aesthetics in literary works.

Fadia Faqir

Fadia Faqir is a Jordanian British writer and is considered one of the most prominent contemporary Arab women writers. Faqir was born and raised in Jordan before immigrating to the U.K. in 1984, where she completed an MA in creative writing at Lancaster University, then a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing in 1990 at the University of East Anglia. She has published three novels so far: Nisanit (1988), Pillars of Salt (1996), and My Name is Salma (2007). She also edited a collection of essays on writing by Arab Women Writers entitled In the House of Silence: Autobiographical Essays by Arab Women Writers (2008). Fadia Faqir is currently a Writing Fellow at St. Aidan’s College, University of Durham.

Maria Assif, University of Toronto

Maria Assif is a lecturer and Coordinator of the Writing about Literature Program in the English Department at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Before this position, she got her PhD from Case Western Reserve University in 2005 and was tenured at Truman College in Chicago. Her research and teaching focus on Ethnic American Literatures, trauma studies, and Arab Women’s writings. Her articles have been published in The Journal of Arts and Sciences, Global Education, and Pennsylvania Notes, and she is presently working on a monograph on trauma narratives in Arab North American fiction. Her article on Moustafa Bayoumi’s How Does it Feel to be a Problem is forthcoming this fall in a collection of essays on after 9/11.

Norman Ravvin, Concordia University

Norman Ravvin is the Chair of Canadian Jewish Studies at Concordia University, Montreal. As a writer, he has three novels to his credit—Cafe des Westens (1991), Lola by Night (2003) and The Joyful Child (2011)—as well as the short story collection Sex, Skyscrapers and Standard Yiddish (1997). He has also written a travelogue entitled Hidden Canada. In his capacity as a scholar, he has authored A House of Words: Jewish Writing, Identity and Memory, co-edited The Canadian Jewish Studies Reader and edited the anthology Not Quite Mainstream: Canadian Jewish Short Stories. He has published articles on—among others—Bruno Schulz, Edgar Allan Poe, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Jack Kerouac, Mordecai Richler, Chava Rosenfarb, and Leonard Cohen.

Krzysztof Majer, University of Łódź

Krzysztof Majer teaches in the Department of American Literature and Culture, University of Łódź. His PhD thesis was entitled The Picaro Messiah and the Unworthy Scribe: A Pattern of Obsession in Mordecai Richler’s Later Fiction. His academic interests include North American post-war fiction as well as Jewish literature and culture. He has written critical essays on Rawi Hage, Mark Anthony Jarman and the Coen Brothers. His most recent publication is a contribution to the Richler issue of Canadian Literature (No 207, Winter 2010; University of British Columbia, Vancouver). He also works as a translator of literature, literary criticism and art criticism.

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