George Gasyna is Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Program in Comparative and World Literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. He specializes in Polish literature, in particular twentieth-century prose and drama, as well as exilic literature and the avant-garde.

• Acknowledgments; A Note on References of Primary Texts; A Note on Translations; Glossary; INTRODUCTION; The Spaces and Trajectories of Exile; CHAPTER ONE; The Condition Known as Exile; Modernism and its "Posts"; "Who, which Gombrowicz?" "Gombrowicz, Gombrowicz"; "JC dropped into literature casually"; On the Conradian Double Man; CHAPTER TWO; Crossing the Threshold of Modernist Discourse; Gombrowicz and the Contested Logics of Postmodernism; The Gombrowiczian Vanguard; Conrad and The Modern(-ist) Temper; Exile and Liminality: A Minority Report; CHAPTER THREE; I. Life Writing; Polish, Hybrid, or Otherwise: Language and the Poetics of Difference; Writing the Subject: What is Exilic Discourse?; II. Charting the Hybrid Self; a. If It's Monday, It Must Be Me: Some Paradoxes of the Gombrowiczian; Subject as an Other. b. Conrad and "Orphaning"; c. Gombrowicz and the "Aunties"; d. Towards the Heart of the Modern Self; CHAPTER FOUR; Toward Heterotopia - The Case of Trans-Atlantyk; Genesis and Amnesia: A Book of Laughter and/or Forgetting; From Marginalization to Heterotopia; CHAPTER FIVE; Imagined Nations, Fractured Narrations:; The Politics of Language and Poetics of Territoriality in Nostromo; On the Inscription of a Zone; The Sites of Conrad's Heterodiscursivity: Prefaces and Postscripts; CHAPTER SIX; The Conditional Narrativity of Cosmos; The Ontology of a Postmodern Text; Poetics of (Subjective) Failure; Gombrowicz, Lacan, and After; CONCLUSION; Identity and its Displacements: Some Closing Axioms; WORKS CITED.

"Skillful and sophisticated, this comparative study challenges the customary readings of Joseph Conrad and Witold Gombrowicz. These two major representatives of modernity and postmodernity are usually perceived within the paradigm of émigré writers seeking acceptance as narrators of tales in a new milieu. Gasyna argues that the two writers created for themselves hybrid identities in language, thus proclaiming their autonomy from their country of origin and from their new homelands. He posits that they are masters of language rather than tellers of tales. Gasyna's bold theorizing is quintessentially postmodern and stimulating." -- Ewa Thompson, Research Professor of Slavic Studies, Rice University, USA