Professor of Comparative Literature; Professor of Slavic Languages & Literatures
paloff@umich.eduOffice Information:
812 East Washington Street
Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-1275
Comparative Literature; Eastern Europe; Central Europe; Philosophy and Theory; Translation Studies; Poetry and Poetics; Genre; International and Regional Studies
Education/Degree:
Ph.D. Slavic Language and Literatures, Harvard University.M.F.A. Creative Writing, University of Michigan.
Highlighted Work and Publications
Bakhtin’s Adventure An Essay on Life without Meaning
Benjamin Paloff
A bold rereading of Mikhail Bakhtin’s groundbreaking theories
A century after Mikhail Bakhtin first began formulating his now-canonical reflections on freedom and literary representation, we often seem as confused as ever about the relationship between narrative form and what it means to live ethically. Focusing on the throughline of adventure in Bakhtin’s thought, we find a peculiar, yet no less ethically urgent challenge: not to imagine the literary hero as if they were a real person but to recognize how we are always imagining real people as if they were literary characters...
Worlds Apart Genre and the Ethics of Representing Camps, Ghettos, and Besieged Cities
Benjamin Paloff
A number of European authors who survived concentration camps, ghettos, and besieged cities in the middle of the twentieth century chose not to write straightforward memoirs or testimonials but instead to fictionalize their experiences. By manipulating narrative time and point of view and altering biographical facts, these writers produced literary texts that challenge common notions of what constitutes an appropriate representation of collective trauma. How might such works provide a deeper understanding of historical truth than the facts alone? What does the literature of the camps reveal ...
See More
Lost in the Shadow of the Word: Space, Time, and Freedom in Interwar Eastern Europe
Benjamin Paloff
2018 AATSEEL Prize for Best Book in Literary Scholarship
Scholars of modernism have long addressed how literature, painting, and music reflected the radical reconceptualization of space and time in the early twentieth century—a veritable revolution in both physics and philosophy that has been characterized as precipitating an “epistemic trauma” around the world. In this wide-ranging study, Benjamin Paloff contends that writers in Central and Eastern Europe felt this impact quite distinctly from their counterparts in Western Europe. For the latter, the destabilization of traditional notions...
See More
Current Courses
COMPLIT 241-001
Topics in Comparative Literature
JUDAIC 218-007
Humanities Topics in Judaism
POLISH 326-001
Polish Literature in English: 1890 to Present
POLISH 526-001
Polish Literature: 1890 to Present
SLAVIC 290-005
Studies in Eastern European Cultures
