Bad Child

Maria Janion (1926–2020) was the greatest Polish leftist intellectual of her generation. The author of twenty-three books and hundreds of articles and essays, she mentored and inspired several generations of Eastern European scholars and political activists. During her life, Janion held appointments at several Polish academic institutions, including the University of Gdańsk and the Institute of Literary Studies in Warsaw.   Marta Figlerowicz is professor of comparative literature at Yale University. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and author of Flat Protagonists and Spaces of Feeling as well as more than a hundred articles, reviews, and essays. Her translations from Polish have appeared in PMLA and The Paris Review.

• Contents Introduction Marta Figlerowicz Translator’s Note Marta Figlerowicz A Maria Janion Reader Part I. A Theory of Eastern Europe 1. Uncanny Slavdom 2. Poland’s Location in Europe 3. Between Death and Laughter: The Art of Jacek Malczewski Part II. Socialism, Patriotism, Nationhood 4. The Patriot-as-Madman 5. Socialism as a Prometheism Part III. Aesthetics, History, and Critical Method 6. The Project of Phantasmatic Critique 7. The History of Literature and the History of Ideas 8. Notes on Horror and Melodrama Part IV. The Authority of the Other 9. Adam Mickiewicz’s Jewish Legion 10. Fragments from a Lover’s Discourse 11. The Bad Child: Interviews Acknowledgments Publication History Index

"The remarkable creativity, energy, and erudition of Maria Janion, one of Poland's most important left-wing feminist critics, shine forth in these essays carefully curated and translated by Marta Figlerowicz." - Sianne Ngai, University of Chicago"Maria Janion's writing is foundational to so many currents of contemporary Central European thought - around nations and nationalism, gender and genre, everyday politics and the political writ large - that her invisibility in English has long struck those of us privileged to know her work as a tragedy, if not a crime. The Bad Child, however, suggests another possibility: that Janion has simply awaited an editor, translator, and scholar equal to the task of encompassing her. She has that, at last, in Marta Figlerowicz. This book belongs on the shelf of every humanist." - Benjamin Paloff, author of Worlds Apart: Genre and the Ethics of Representing Camps, Ghettos, and Besieged Cities