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 20th-century prose and drama, as well as exilic literature and the avant-garde.

• AcknowledgmentsA Note on References of Primary Texts A Note on Translations GlossaryINTRODUCTION The Spaces and Trajectories of Exile CHAPTER ONE The Condition Known as ExileModernism and its "Posts""Who, which Gombrowicz?" "Gombrowicz, Gombrowicz""JC dropped into literature casually"On the Conradian Double Man CHAPTER TWOCrossing the Threshold of Modernist DiscourseGombrowicz and the Contested Logics of PostmodernismThe Gombrowiczian Vanguard; Conrad and The Modern(-ist) TemperExile and Liminality: A Minority Report CHAPTER THREE I. Life WritingPolish, Hybrid, or Otherwise: Language and the Poetics of DifferenceWriting the Subject: What is Exilic Discourse?II. Charting the Hybrid Self CHAPTER FOURToward Heterotopia - The Case of Trans-AtlantykGenesis and Amnesia: A Book of Laughter and/or ForgettingFrom Marginalization to Heterotopia CHAPTER FIVE Imagined Nations, Fractured Narrations: The Politics of Language and Poetics of Territoriality in NostromoOn the Inscription of a ZoneThe Sites of Conrad's Heterodiscursivity: Prefaces and Postscripts CHAPTER SIX The Conditional Narrativity of CosmosThe Ontology of a Postmodern TextPoetics of (Subjective) FailureGombrowicz, 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