The article deals with Stanisław Barańczak’s essayistic work which is analyzed mostly in the philosophical and theoretical context, as well as in relation to the transformation of Barańczak’s poetry. The author argues that Barańczak is an inheritor of the Enlightenment, poet of high modernism, defender of the subject’s autonomy, and an author indebted to Descartes and Marx.
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Viveiros de Castro discusses how a “multinaturalist” perspectivism that emphasizes the point of view of Amazonian Indigenous peoples relates to the notion of species. Amerindian perspectivism is a theory and vision of the world with a strong connection to multinaturalism, a category that is opposed to multiculturalism and that assumes the coexistence of different “natures” as in Amazonian cosmology. These “natures” include non-human animal perception along with a human one, all of them sharing a common perspective or affinity.
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Keywords: Faustyna Kowalska' Little Diary; diary writing; performance; mysticism
The Little Diary of Faustyna Kowalska, a mystic and saint of the Catholic Church, is a frequently translated Polish book, and yet until now its study and scholarly editing has only been undertaken specialists from the Vatican. Kubkowski presents the Little Diary not only as a ‘text,’ but as a testimony of several layers of creative performance, editorial and publishing efforts. Subjected to more or less systematic reworking, copy editing, and supplied with a critical apparatus consisting of introductions, postscripts, chronologies and footnotes, the manuscript becomes a book, emancipating itself, so to say, from the shape given to it by the author. What is more, the very act of creating the entries, rooted as it is in mystical experience, evolves from a ‘struggle’ with the medium towards refined writing forms, constituting what Kubkowski reads as a chain of handwritten ‘events’.
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Keywords: Intergenerational memory; the Spanish historical novel; women’s narratives on Communism
This article examines the formation of generational consciousness in two generations of women in an act of recovering memory. The return to the forgotten history of the opposition constitutes the generational consciousness of the women who participated in those events. At the same time, for modern women an interest in their fate represents a search for tradition outside the predominantly male narrative of mainstream historiography. Today, historical novels are the literary manifestation of this phenomenon in Spain. Calderón Puerta examines narrative strategies associated with the recovery and redefinition of this kind of generational memory. Based on two concrete examples, she shows how women writers of the ‘second generation’ try to recover the memory of the Communists’ struggle against the Francoism after the Spanish Civil War. As the generation of mothers and grandmothers rebuilds their own story, it runs parallel with today’s story about them, in which the generation of daughters and granddaughters tackles their tradition and identity.
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Keywords: Bolesław Prus; The Doll [Lalka]; realism; realist novel; modernity; timetable
The realism of Bolesław Prus’s novel The Doll [Lalka] has been studied many times in relation to the topography of Warsaw, but his pedantic accuracy also extends to the domain covered by the railway. Contrary to the claims of eminent scholars (such as Józef Bachórz and Stanisław Fita), Prus’s description of Wokulski’s aborted journey to Cracow is perfectly in sync with the timetable from the second half of May 1879. Wokulski’s return from Skierniewice to Warsaw and his earlier suicide attempt also overlap with actual train times. The train timetable appears to be a key text in the interpretation of The Doll. This is a novel about the life of the great metropolis, whose smooth functioning, according to Georg Simmel, demands citizens meticulously to respect the ‘trans-subjective time scheme’ [übersubjektives Zeitschema].
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Keywords: migrant; immigration; East-Central Europe; Poland; Romania; film
Post-Cold-War global events have pushed the hitherto shadowy figure of the migrant centre-stage: she has become the embodiment of a contrasting ideological landscape in which unprecedented levels of mobility wage daily battle with renewed anxieties about the ‘stranger within’ and the invading ‘Other’ from outside. In a post-1989 European context, this mobility has translated into successive waves of immigration from East-Central Europe to the West, which have shaped debates on integration, human rights, citizenship, cultural diversity and national identity. The article looks at contemporary cinematic and television productions that problematize the impact of this phenomenon in Britain, with particular focus on Channel 4’s three-part series The Romanians Are Coming (2015) and Ken Loach’s hybrid docu-drama It’s a Free World, 2007.
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Keywords: Schulz; extravagance; bizarreness; erring; affects; experience
Nycz explores how the work of Bruno Schulz can be read through the concept of ‘extravagance’. This concept, which is key to the poetics of Schulz’s prose, has a variety of connotations: bizarreness, weirdness, exaggeration, as well as erring, going beyond, going astray. In this article, extravagance is understood as a rhetorical and stylistic device; it is defined with reference to the ‘atmospheric’ harmonization of the affects of Schulz’s experiential narrative; it is seen as a trait of the positions, appearances and behaviours of the characters in the fictional universe; it is understood as a consequence of the ‘diffusing’ context of his anthropological and cultural project; it is seen in relation to the metaphorical model of the creative process; it is seen in terms of the ‘prefigurative’ semantic organization of the short stories, and finally as a characteristic of the ‘messianic’ challenge that those short stories activate in the reader.
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Keywords: Polish culture of commemoration; politics of memory; memory tools; ‘cursed soldiers’; Righteous Among the Nations; Volhynia massacres
Kobielska examines the culture of commemoration in Poland today, framing it in terms of ‘memory tools’ and describing the plurality of the commemorative tendencies it produces. She discusses three of them: the commemoration of the so-called ‘cursed solders,’ the purposeful organisation and use of the ways in which the Righteous Among the Nations are remembered, and the memory of the massacres of Poles in Volhynia. This allows her to characterize Polish memory as an auto-affirmation, while also showing different variations and mechanisms of this auto-affirmation, which nevertheless essentially strives to form an impeccable image of the past, to foster a sense of accomplishment and dignity, and to eliminate any doubts concerning the image produced. At the same time Kobielska demonstrates the ambivalence of these tendencies, the insecurity of their synchronization and the resulting possibility of their critical reinterpretation.
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Keywords: Jelinek; Kristeva; body; discourses of love;
Gromek reads Elfriede Jelinek’s novel Lust through Julia Kristeva’s reflections on discourses of love and on the ways in which emotions are revealed and become fixed in language. Gromek’s focus is on the formation of the author, the novel’s protagonist and the researcher – three instances that work to enable the inscription of personal and bodily experience in the literary text. Literary connections help define the subjects’ dependence networks, in which each one can assume a dominant or submissive position. One essential aspect is the discovery of principles according to which semiotic elements upset the symbolic order. Gromek points out such moments in Lust, treating the body as an intellectual and interpretative category.
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Keywords: neo avant-garde; conceptual art; body-art; feminist art; “consumer art”
The paper shows Natalia Lach-Lachowicz (Natalia LL) as a neo avant-garde artist whoseworks in a specific maximalistic way are very close to the main currents of avant-gardetrends: newmediality (photograph), minimalism, conceptualism, performance, bodyart,pop-art and feminist art. The paper concentrates mainly on the mutual influencingfeatures of conceptualism, consumptionism and feminism in Natalia LL’s works and paysattention to the emancipational potential of her works of the 70s and 80s.
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Keywords: climate catastrophe; end time; messianism; Atomic Age; Günther Anders; Giorgio Agamben;
Exploring the climate catastrophe as a serious challenge for philosophy, Mościcki tries to grasp in what ways the vision of an approaching apocalypse modifies the concepts of time to which modernity has accustomed us. He examines two notions of “end time”. The first, developed by philosopher Günther Anders in the context of the threat that defines the Atomic Age – a threat that Anders sees as a historic milestone. The second notion of end time examined here is Giorgio Agamben’s concept of messianism in The Time That Remains – a concept also influenced by Anders. Mościcki highlights these two writers’ relevance for discussions of the anthropocene.
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Keywords: Russian-Israeli literature; myth; mythopoesis; cultural paradigm;
The text is a review of Roman Katsman’s monograph, entitled Vysshaya legkost’sozidaniya. Sleduyushchiye sto let russko-izrail’skoy literatury (Boston–St. Petersburg: Academic Studies Press–BiblioRossica, 2021). This is a continuation of his research included in the previous book, Neulovimaya real’nost’. Sto let russko-izrail’skoy literatury (1920–2020) (Boston–St. Petersburg: Academic Studies Press–BiblioRossica, 2020). Katsman steps back from perceiving Russian-Israeli literature as a part of Russian literature and describing it only in contexts and connections related to Russian culture. The recognition of such literary autonomy requires a separate research method, tools and conceptual apparatus. In his book from 2020, Katsman presents a philosophical and cultural paradigm, which aims to define the perspective of Russian-Israeli literature; in the other monograph, he supplements this paradigm with the myth-creating potential contained in this literature.
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Keywords: grotesque; freak; disgust; body; otherness
Kowalcze explores the grotesqueness of the body of Matthew Windrove, the protagonistof William Golding’s novel Darkness Visible. Several aspects typical of this conventionare present in the novel, but Polish literary scholars have not yet tackled the subject.Examining the character’s transgressive physical form Kowalcze focuses on the wayWindrove is perceived by his surrounding. His grotesqueness provokes astonishment,fear and disgust, he becomes a freak, monster and abject. At the same time he gives riseto a profound anthropological reflection on the conditions of being human, the bordersbetween what “belongs” and what is “other,” and the status of human cognitive functions.
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Keywords: affective atmosphere; affect; affective capitalism; Women’s Strike; pandemic;
This article advocates the usefulness of affective atmospheres – a category unpopular inthe Polish scholarship – to the study of modernity. To demonstrate the claim, Krajewskireconstructs the category’s meaning, its sources, the traditions from which it stems, andthe contexts of its past uses. Moreover, the text presents the results of selected relevantstudies. Next, Krajewski demonstrates the usefulness of this category in understandingcontemporary sociocultural phenomena by using affective atmospheres to understandhow Poles’ experienced the pandemic, explain the form of the Women’s Strike in 2020and 2021, and identify the sources of the January 6 United States Capitol attack.
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Keywords: postmodernism in Ukrainian literature; literature in the face of war; fictions of propaganda; Russian media discourse;
The article discusses four Ukrainian novels published in Polish translations, whichdepict the war in the Donbas region: Serhiy Zhadan’s The Orphanage, PetroYatsenko’s Mahnetyzm (Magnetism), Volodymyr Rafeyenko’s Dovhi chasy (Long Times),and Tamara Duda’s Daughter. Images of war appeared in Ukrainian literature after 2014,in response to the conflict in Donbass. Moreover, the texts also form a reaction to thetheses of Russian propaganda and respond to aggression justifications that appear inthe discourse.
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Keywords: Kearney; phenomenology; touch; excarnation; optocentrism
Review: R. Kearney, On Touch: Recovering Our Most Vital Sense, Columbia University Press,New York 2021.
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Keywords: retrotopia; postmemory; war in Ukraine; culture and politics; culture and war; Russian culture
The article examines the phenomenon of retrotopia in parts of modern Russian culturethat refer directly or indirectly to the war in Ukraine, as well as the phenomenon ofpostmemory, which serves as a counterbalance to the construction of Russia as akatechon, liberator, and moral model for the rest of the world. The analysis of culturaltexts revealed that retrotopia is a common denominator for those manifestations ofculture that fuel the Russian dream of greatness and the myth of the Empire, while theappeal to postmemory connects authors attempting to work through Russia’s difficultpast. Thus, the study shows that both retrotopia and postmemory hinder present-dayRussia from finding its place in the modern world and contribute to the renewal of itscultural traumas.
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Keywords: contemporary Polish literature; feminist prose; comparative studies
Manuela Gretkowska, Joanna Bator and Grażyna Plebanek: three female authors, each of them involved in the ‘pro-woman’ discourse. Are the literary testimonies of this discourse and the figurations of femininity in their prose subject to synthesis in terms of the heroines’ freedom aspirations? What is the freedom of women in the light of these texts? The comparative procedure consists of three steps. Firstly, a comparison of the worlds presented in the dimension of the protagonists’ fates and the final storyline solutions. Secondly — of the functionality of the chosen state of aggregation within the plot, i.e. eroticism as a set of specific images (or anti-images) of the protagonists’ experiences. Thirdly — comparing the narrative structures (e.g. the role of metafiction), as well as attempting to determine what the selected modus operandi of each narrative results in.
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