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Between Mimicry and Hybridity: New Fiction Interrogating the Identity of Polish Post-2004 Migrants in the UK

Przeciw stereotypom: mimikra a hybrydyczność. Współczesna proza polska na tropie tożsamości polskich migrantów w Wielkiej Brytanii

Author(s): Tomasz Dobrogoszcz / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 3/2016

Keywords: migrant literature; contemporary Polish literature; postcolonial theory; hybridity; migrant identity; Homi Bhabha

This article examines selected works of Polish fiction to analyse representations of the socio-cultural conditions of the diaspora that formed in the UK after Poland’s accession to the EU in 2004. Dobrogoszcz employs the categories of postcolonial theory used by Homi K. Bhabha in The Location of Culture to offer a critical review of stereotypes that have dominated the perception of Polish migrants in the UK, and to examine their role in the process of migrant identity formation. Faced with the incommensurability of foreign culture, Polish newcomers to the British Isles are bound to deal with the their national identity and to accept its inevitably hybrid character.

Human Nature: The Premise and Promise of Anthropology

Natura ludzka: założenie i nadzieja antropologii

Author(s): Nigel Rapport / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 1/2018

Keywords: human nature; anthropology; human potential; realizing human potential; human uniqueness; zigzagging;

The question of human nature – what it is to be human – provides a prime site for ‘anthropology in the world’: a means to engage with debates beyond the academy and to show anthropology’s special contribution. It also provides a means to anchor a discipline whose ‘writing of the human’ encompasses the ethical and aesthetic as well as the scientific, the individually particular as well as the universally general, the personal alongside the social, cultural, historical, practical and biological.

The Place of Birth and Identity Constructions: Preliminaries

Miejsce urodzenia a projektowanie tożsamości – przymiarki

Author(s): Karolina Koprowska / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 2/2019

Keywords: place of birth; identity; surrounding; place of origin; little fatherland [mała ojczyzna]

Koprowska presents several theoretical approaches to defining the place of birth as a possible cultural and analytical category. Referring to the connotations of two elements of this category – the place of birth and the birth certificate – she situates the place of birth in the context of geopoetic concepts such as the little fatherland (mała ojczyzna), surrounding, anthropological place, native lands, place of origin, autobiographical place, etc. She suggests different ways of understanding the place of birth and outlines its different contexts while also exploring its symbolic and meaning-making potential in the construction of identity.

Mickiewicz at the Collège de France: Lectures, Humanities, Politics

Mickiewicz w Collège de France: wykład, humanistyka, polityka

Author(s): Michał Kuziak / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 3/2019

Keywords: Mickiewicz; Romanticism; humanities; Slavic literature; minor literature

Kuziak examines Mickiewicz’s lectures at the Collège de France and the intermingling of scholarship (the emerging humanities) and politics, arguing that they were subject to a variety of changing and sometimes contradictory economical meanings. As a work/event they come close to what Deleuze and Guattari call minor literature.

The Archive as a Writer’s Testament and Depository of a Biographical Legend

Archiwum jako pisarski testament i depozyt legendy biograficznej

Author(s): Lucyna Marzec / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 6/2018

Keywords: archive; Kazimiera Iłłakowiczówna; biographical legend; literary critical debate

The archive functions as a writer’s testament and as a depository of his or her biographical legend. Marzec examines two archival collections, held at different institutions, relating to the poet Kazimiera Iłłakowiczówna. She asks how they deal with the famous controversy about the collection Szeptem, which is characteristic of the transformations of poetic diction. The archive as a writer’s testament can be seen in terms of the poet’s self-representation – how she presents her work and her involvement in literary circles. The archive as a depository of a biographical legend has a narrower aim, namely to create or maintain the biographical legend. Each form of archival activity, Marzec argues, has paradoxes and limitations, and neither is culturally or socially neutral.

The Russian Intelligentsia

Wykład I [O inteligencji rosyjskiej]

Author(s): Wiktor Woroszylski / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 5/2019

Keywords: Russian literature; Wiktor Woroszylski; Towarzystwo Kursów Naukowych [Society of Academic Courses]; Russian intelligentsia; 1917 revolution

The poet, essayist and literary scholar Wiktor Woroszylski (1927-1996) was active in the Towarzystwo Kursów Naukowych [Society of Academic Courses], an independent organisation of intellectuals established in Poland in 1977. In 1978 he gave the following lecture on the Russian intelligentsia of the nineteenth and twentieth century. In Russia the education of the intelligentsia was linked to the development of social and literary research. The elite was trying to address social inequality and injustice, but their good intentions sometimes led them to condone terrorism, and eventually to sanction the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Examining the intelligentsia Woroszylski is able to point out links between the works of Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Blok and Gorky.

The Bioarcheology of Disability

Bioarcheologia niepełnosprawności

Author(s): Magdalena Matczak,Jane E. Buikstra,Jessica Pearson,Andrzej Marek Wyrwa / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 2/2020

Keywords: bioarcheology; disability; history of bioarcheologiy; history of science;

The authors discuss disability research conducted within the framework of the bioarcheology of disability – a trend that has seen dynamic development in recent years. They outline the history of this research, its goals, methods and theoretical approaches. Bioarcheology, which focuses on studying osteological material in a cultural context, provides meaningful information on the diseases and impairments experienced by people in the past. This research has shown that different attitudes to disabled people have been adopted across the ages. Discussing these attitudes, the authors focus on care and concern for disabled people. They then present the debate on the key research problems of the bioarcheology of disability and make new research proposals.

Combatting Street Noise in Interwar Warsaw. Trend or Necessity?

Walka z hałasem ulicznym w międzywojennej Warszawie. Moda czy konieczność?

Author(s): Sławomir Łotysz / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 2/2020

Keywords: Second Polish Republic; noise; city; transport; history;

In the interwar period, the fight against noise pollution was as present in Polish society as it was in developed Western countries. Anti-noise committees and leagues emerged, weeks of silence were organised and levels of noise were measured in the streets. Łotysz uses reports from these measurements as well as other textual sources from the epoch to show that the noise in Polish cities was not a measure of progress, but on the contrary– of backwardness. The main cause of noise pollution was not an excess of cars, as in the Western cities that served as a benchmark, but the disastrous condition of the streets and tracks, outdated means of transport and archaic road traffic regulations.

Poland’s Lunacy After March 1968: Jerzy Krzysztoń’s Obłęd [Madness]

Polskie szaleństwo po Marcu. Obłęd Jerzego Krzysztonia

Author(s): Jan Borowicz / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 2/2020

Keywords: Holocaust memory; psychosis; psychoanalysis; Michel Foucault;

Borowicz analyses Jerzy Krzyszoń’s novel Obłęd [Madness], treating it not only as a literary testimony of the experience of psychosis, but also as an expression of the social conflicts that marked Poland after March 1968. The first part of the article is concerned with a psychoanalytic understanding of psychosis and the possibility of its linguistic recording, whereas the second part places the fears and hallucinations described in the novel in their historical context. Obłęd [Madness] can be seen as an unexpected literary reaction to the anti-Semitic campaign of March 1968 which suggests another, more inclusive, understanding of Polish identity.

Encounters at the End of Life

Spotkania na krańcach życia

Author(s): Jakub Momro / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 1/2020

Keywords: apocalyptic imagination; extinction of genres; biological death; politics of nature; natural contract; climate wars; climate crisis; biosphere;

Momro outlines the key themes currently bearing on the humanities with regard to the challenges that humanity faces as a species that destroys the planet. His main thesis is that the humanities must reformulate their ways of legitimising and creating knowledge and truth procedures. Momro highlights the essential elements of the biological, technological, environmental and climate crisis in the context of the discursive and political crisis that emerges with the revival of the apocalyptic imagination.

Inventing Poetry Afresh: Avant-Garde Poetic Discourse in Late-Twentieth-Century China

Wymyślanie poezji od nowa. Awangardowy dyskurs poetycki w Chinach końca XX wieku

Author(s): Joanna Krenz / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 5/2020

Keywords: contemporary Chinese poetry; Zhai Yongming; memory; female consciousness / awareness; women’s poetry;

Zhai Yongming (b. 1955) is a woman poet whose debut in the mid-1980s marks the beginning of the process that Jeanne Hong Zhang, in her eponymous book, called “the invention of a discourse,” meaning the discourse of women’s poetry in contemporary China. Due to the perennial marginalisation of the female poetic voice in China, this invention was significantly inspired by foreign literary trends, of which American confessional poetry is a prominent example. Once this largely exogenous discourse was invented, it had to be sensibly linked to the millennia of written Chinese history. The present paper discusses three strategies, termed here as “archaeology”, “arachnology”, and “alchemy,” which Zhai deploys in her mature work to integrate women’s poetry into cultural memory of Chinese society and into the bloodstream of the Chinese literary discourse to establish a solid foundation for the further development of her “invention”.

“To Describe the Skin of the Ocean”: Adam Zagajewski’s Aquatic Imagination

„Opisać skórę oceanu”. Wyobraźnia akwatyczna Adama Zagajewskiego

Author(s): Bogusława Bodzioch-Bryła / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 5/2020

Keywords: Adam Zagajewski; aquatic motives; contemporary Polish poetry; analysis and interpretation;

Aquatic motives occur frequently in Adam Zagajewski’s poetry. Bodzioch-Bryła produces (1) an analysis of the aquatic element as extensive in an anthropological-cultural sense, encompassing a wealth of meanings, including ones that have a symbolical or sacral provenance; this is sometimes realised through lyrical and diverse concretisations of the water’s different hues; (2) a vivisection of the aquatic element as a personified or animated being (sometimes bringing to mind a greedy and dangerous creature); (3) a view of the water as a medium, a carrier of memory able to safeguard memories of humanity, places and cultural achievements. According to Zagajewski’s friends, his aquatic sensitivity grows out of what we could call real, somatic experience, which over the course of time translates into intellectual poetic discourse.

Syrenism: The Poetry of Julia Fiedorczuk

Syrenizm: poezja Julii Fiedorczuk

Author(s): Monika Rudaś-Grodzka / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 5/2020

Keywords: syrenizm; hybridity; ecopoetry; remythologisation;

Rudaś-Grodzka explores the different functions of myth in the poetry of Julia Fiedorczuk (born 1975), which can be seen as one of the most interesting artistic developments in Poland today. Fiedorczuk is a literary scholar and translator and her work draws on American Modernists, ecocriticism and feminism. Rudaś-Grodzka explores Fiedorczuk’s poetic strategy, which on many semantic levels is characterised by hybridity. RudaśGrodzka also proposes the concept of syrenism, understood as a creative stance that opposes unifying or bonding forces, which give rise to a continuum and symmetry.

The Past in Museums – Two Models of Representation: A Comparative Analysis of the European Solidarity Centre and the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk

Przeszłość w muzeach – dwa modele reprezentacji. Analiza porównawcza Europejskiego Centrum Solidarności i Muzeum II Wojny Światowej w Gdańsku

Author(s): Anna Ziębińska-Witek / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 4/2020

Keywords: historical museum; representation; exhibition models; European Solidarity Centre; Museum of the Second World War; museology;

Ziębińska-Witek analyses and deconstructs the museum narratives of two historical museums in Gdańsk. The material examined are the exhibitions at the European Solidarity Centre and the Museum of the Second World War, which are interpreted using the methods of visual studies (analyses of the composition, content, material objects and meanings). Based on this Ziębińska-Witek highlights two basic models of creating a vision of the past through museum exhibitions: the romantic and the critical model. Despite the fact that both institutions represent the contemporary museological trend of creating an “experience” and engaging the public on an emotional level, they differ widely both in the way they describe reality and in their perception of the museum’s function as a cultural institution.

Crisis of Experience and Authority: A Philosophical and Political Essay

Kryzys doświadczenia i autorytetu. Esej filozoficzno-polityczny

Author(s): Mikołaj Ratajczak / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 4/2020

Keywords: crisis; experience; authority; language; cynicism;

Ratajczak proposes a conceptual framework to describe the condition of our times understood as an era of crisis. This crisis is described from a “subjective” perspective as a crisis of experience (following Walter Benjamin) and authority (following Hannah Arendt). Ratajczak highlights the structural link between experience and authority and explores their shared crisis. Drawing on studies in the philosophy of language, Ratajczak presents the crisis of experience and authority as a particular form of indiviuation in language.

Konzentrationslager Buchenwald, Post Weimar (in Polish Literature)

Konzentrationslager Buchenwald, Post Weimar (w literaturze polskiej)

Author(s): Arkadiusz Morawiec / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 3/2020

Keywords: Polish literature; concentration camp literature; Konzentrationslager Buchenwald;

In the context of the Polish literature devoted to Nazi German concentration camps, the works dealing with the subject of Buchenwald are rather scarce. None of them are masterpieces or at least exceptional literary works. Some, however, are interesting cognitionor artistic-wise. The former include the prewar reportages by Stanisław Nogaj entitled Za drutami i kratami Trzeciej Rzeszy (Behind the fences and bars of the Third Reich) and the memoirs of Władysław Wójcik entitled Byłem w piekle… (I’ve been to hell…), overlooked by the researchers of the Nazi camps, and the poems written in Buchenwald, which are an interesting account in their own right. I would include among the latter the first edition of Bohdan Urbankowski’s poetry cycle Głosy (The Voices) and Piotr Matywiecki’s poem *** Wywleczeni na słońce… (*** Dragged into the sun). Situated between the two groups is Mieczysław Lurczyński’s revelatory – not just in the context of Polish literature – drama Stara Gwardia (The Old Guard), which depicts the so-called “grey zone” (to use the term of Primo Levi). The remaining works are interesting mostly as manifestation of ideological and political involvement (visible not just in the Polish People’s Republic period, although mostly then), as well as of collective and individual memory and sensitivity. As a literary theme, Buchenwald has not been and likely never will be able to “compete” with camps located in the Polish territories, especially with Auschwitz-Birkenau, which is a central symbol of Polish martyrology and of Shoah, also being, in the words of Imre Kertész, “a timeless tale marked with the stigma of non-transience”

Madagaskar: Projects and Passages from Bogdan Wojdowski’s Non-Existent Drama

Madagaskar – o nienapisanym dramacie Bogdana Wojdowskiego

Author(s): Alina Molisak / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 3/2020

Keywords: Wojdowski; Madagaskar [Madagascar]; drama; Warsaw Ghetto;

Molisak describes surviving passages from the play Madagaskar [Madagascar] written by Bogdan Wojdowski in the sixties. The playwright intended to create a work on the existential situation in the Warsaw Ghetto after most Jews had been deported to the Treblinka camp.

From Narrative to Telegraph: (Not Just) Plague Literature and the Problem of the Media

Od opowiadania do telegrafu: literatura (nie tylko) o zarazie i problem mediów

Author(s): Jan P. Hudzik / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 3/2021

Keywords: plague literature; medium; narrative; telegraph; metaphysics of narrative; ontology of narrative; media philosophy;

Hudzik proposes a philosophical theory of the media through a discussion of globalplague literature. He begins by asking why the characters of The Decameron tell eachother banal stories, then he treats narrative as a medium and distinguishes metaphysicsfrom ontology of narrative, based on (modern) subjects using practical wisdom. Finally,he analyses the literary representations of the telegraph (Camus, Dumas). What do theycontribute to our understanding of the media?

Older Brother: On Miłosz and Różewicz

Starszy brat: o Miłoszu i Różewiczu

Author(s): Andrzej Franaszek / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 4/2021

Keywords: Czesław Miłosz; Tadeusz Różewicz; Polish poetry in the second half of the twentieth century; Polish epistolography in the second half of the twentieth century;

Czesław Miłosz and Tadeusz Różewicz have shaped the landscape of Polish poetry inthe second half of the twentieth century. Franaszek retraces the relationship betweenthe lives of these outstanding artists and examines their different personality traits.Besides offering psychological portraits of the two men, Franaszek highlights the feelingsthat arose between them and which led Różewicz to describe their relationship as“a brotherhood of poets”.

Acts of Violence in Szczepan Twardoch’s Novels Król [The King of Warsaw] and Królestwo [The Kingdom]

Gry przemocy w powieściach Król i Królestwo Szczepana Twardocha

Author(s): Sławomir Jacek Żurek / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 5/2021

In Szczepan Twardoch’s novels Król [The King of Warsaw] and Królestwo [The Kingdom],the modernist order is based on violence – a violence transforms the old world into thenew one. This “founding violence” (René Girard) is a travesty of the myth of the cosmicturning point, of the victim-king and the downfall of his kingdom. Twardoch showshow in this process a new anthropology is born. Within that anthropology, Jews (beingrepresentatives of the order once revealed by God and now considered obsolete) areeventually excluded. They become the victim whose death is to bring an ideologicalpurification of the world. Hence the Shoah is perceived as an embodiment of a gameof uncertain rules – in Girard’s terms, this is “a game of mortal fear”, a fear that is desiredonly to be finally “overcome in death and downfall”.