The Effect of Palimpsest ─ Culture, Literature, History

This volume, entitled The Effect of Palimpsest: Culture, Literature, History, 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.

Bozena 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.