Poza strukturą. Metonimia i tradycyjne obrazy w eposach Homera

Author(s): Jędrzej Soliński / Language(s): Polish Issue: 10/2020

The article discusses the question of traditional images in Greek epic poetry, which are based on metonymy, coexisting with themes and type-scenes and stabilising the epic song. Firstly, I present a sketch of oral theory, originally presented by M. Parry and A. Lord. Secondly, I deal with the question of the type-scenes in Homeric epics and Russian oral epic songs—the middle element of A. Lord’s oral song structure. After that, I move on to cognitive theory and its application to Homeric epics, especially in the matter of cognitive scripts as a basis for the construction of type-scenes. Furthermore, I connect cognitive theory with M. Nagler’s Gestalt, A. N. Sabynin’s DRK-structures and J.M. Foley’s traditional referentiality, which are based on a metonymy. On that basis, I present some examples of traditional images of “house” in the Odyssey, which consist of recurrent elements, such as “megaron,” “bedroom,” “wife,” “children,” etc. The singer evokes the traditional image of the “house” using metonymy. The analysis of examples reveals that these images, regardless of the exact words used by the singer, are stable—just as the type-scenes built on M. Clark’s basic scaffolding

A Gnostic in the Garden: Myth and Religion in Louise Glück’s Poem

Author(s): Piotr Zazula / Language(s): English Issue: 10/2020

Louise Glück repeatedly refers to the Bible and classical mythology, even when writing about poignantly personal issues. Far from being mere high-brow literary embellishments, these cultural quotes and intertextual analogs testify to Glück’s consistent attempt to transcend the traditionally personalist scope of lyric poetry. Such a resolutely transpersonal perspective is particularly discernible in her poems dealing with broadly-conceived religious themes, especially that of cultivating the postlapsarian, modern analog of the Biblical Garden of Eden. In A Village Life(2009), for example, the ontological possibility of transcendence is alternately hinted at and questioned, with the poet inhabiting a transition zone between doubt and faith as a questioning believer, so to speak. In the much-earlier The Wild Iris (1992), the axiological status of God is explored in highly unorthodox ways, the poems’ speakers undermining many established images of God in Christian and Jewish traditions. Arguably, what the two volumes share is their Gnostic imagery, purposely veiled in A Village Life and more explicit in The Wild Iris. Already present in Firstborn (1968), Gnostic undertones can also be found in other volumes, e.g. The House on Marshland (1975) and Descending Figure (1980). Iconoclastic and transgressive, Glück’s poems often expose a destructive facet of transcendence or feature some kind of charge against God, explicit or implicit. The Creator for the most part remains irritatingly silent, with the poet constantly bringing this up—sometimes in a tongue-in-cheek, sometimes in a deadly serious manner. A virtuoso of register shifts, Louise Glück plays cat and mouse with the reader, evading any closures. Her personal creed remains a riddle

Mesjanizm Camõesa (po polsku)

Author(s): Magdalena Bąk / Language(s): Polish Issue: 35/2020

The aim of the text is to present images of Camões created by nineteenth-century Polish writers. The author of the article refers to the following literary works: Kamoens w szpitalu [Camões in Hospital] by Julian Korsak, Kamoens by Fryderyk Halm and Don Sébastien de Portugal by Aleksander Przezdziecki. The authors of the analyzed texts regarded Camões as an outstanding and suffering poet, who believed in a specific form of messianism.

Not a saviour of the world: dismissal of messianism in Graham Swift’s Waterland

Author(s): Sławomir Konkol / Language(s): English Issue: 35/2020

The article considers the highly critical handling of the British brand of messianism in Graham Swift’s novel Waterland (1983) in the light of Jacques Lacan’s concept of the phallus. The issue is approached through the figure of the narrator’s half-brother, spawned to be the saviour of the world and the narrator’s attitude towards promises of a grand future, an epitome of Graham Swift’s overall distrust of totalising narratives. The desire for a complete and final explanation is shown to be as inescapable as it is impossible to fulfil.

Осврт на историју белоруске србистике

Author(s): Ivan Aleksejevič Čarota,Anna Vladimirovna Naumova / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 171/2020

Pustka po przeżytym. Szkic o doświadczeniu niemożliwym

Author(s): Adam Kubiak / Language(s): Polish Issue: 6/2020

Kubiak tackles the impasse associated with describing liminal, transformative, ortransgressive events and experiences. He proposes the concept of “impossible experience”,which refers to collective or/and individual experiences and related events that do notlend themselves to thematisation, or whose thematisation poses a significant threatto the community affected by the issue in question. Such a threat can be seen as relatedto that community’s symbolic self-image and to its basic, primary axiological foundations.

Człowiek w płomieniach. Mityczna wyobraźnia Artura Pałygi

Author(s): Jacek Kopciński / Language(s): Polish Issue: 6/2020

Kopciński discusses the work of Polish playwright Artur Pałyga (b. 1971), especially Powrótbogów [The Return of the Gods, 2017], a collection of plays that draw on different poetics(oratorium, dramatic poem, mysterium, poetic monodrama). For Pałyga, the source of the gods’ return is not tradition or history but the human need to encounter the non-human– the archaic myth reactivated in the characters’ liminal situations (death, disease, selfsacrifice,spiritual loneliness), as well as the playwright’s experience of trying to identifywith the speaker of a dramatic text. Kopciński suggests that Pałyga’s characters strive towards a form of absolute being that recalls the notion of the sacred proposed byhistorian of religion Mircea Eliade (1907–1986). The archaic symbol connecting the characters’ experience is fire (flame, spark, solar heat, lethal radiation). Kopciński’s analysis of Pałyga’s mythical imagination focuses on the transformations of this symbol.

„Jest taka cierpienia granica, za którą się uśmiech pogodny zaczyna”. O kilku przedziwnych splotach poezji i rzeczywistości

Author(s): Adam Fitas / Language(s): Polish Issue: 6/2020

Fitas explores the mysterious links between literature and reality that can arise when a sensitive reader encounters a poetic work. His starting point is the book Walc na troje[Waltz for Three], which presents literary texts, correspondence as well as manuscript drafts and photographs to showcase the unusual reception of one poem by CzesławMiłosz. This reception reveals an interesting entanglement between the lives of the poet,of his characters and of the readers of his poems on the one hand and, on the other hand,the existence of characters and meanings immortalised through poetic imagination in the literary text.

Okna Jana Potockiego

Author(s): Krzysztof Mrowcewicz / Language(s): Polish Issue: 6/2020

Mrowcewicz explores the voyeuristic element in The Manuscript Found in Saragossaby Count Jan Potocki, a book about peeping, tracking, investigating – a novel about windows, parted curtains, keyholes, mirrors; a tale of fragments, repetitions and deceptive reflections. It can be read as the capitulation of the scholar and the writer of the enlightenment, who must eventually acknowledge that humankind’s cognitivetools are imperfect, our helplessness regarding the world, which we can only perceivein fragments and reflections. In this sense Potocki’s suicide – he shot himself facinga wall – becomes symbolical.

Wyspa na wyspie. Cristina Campo czyta opowiadania Gustawa Herlinga-Grudzińskiego

Author(s): Małgorzata Ślarzyńska,Christina Campo / Language(s): Polish Issue: 6/2020

This is the first Polish translation of Cristina Campo’s 1961 essay La torre e l’isola in which she discusses the Italian edition of Gustaw Herling-Grudziński’s short story collection Skrzydła ołtarza (Pale di altare) from 1960. Ślarzyńska has added a brief introduction presenting Cristina Campo and her relationship with the Polish writer.

Po pierwsze nie metaforyzuj! O tropach demencji

Author(s): Hanna Serkowska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2021

Serkowska examines the functions of metaphorical expressions in texts that belong to the maladic narrative current of the Alzheimerian variant. The point of departure is Susan Sontag’s polemic with the notion of illness as a metaphor, but Serkowska also takes into account Max Black’s interaction theory of metaphor and cognitive science.Her examples are texts where the key motif is dementia, describing the functions of the dementia-related metaphors as a source domain of metaphors and as a target domain.

Cele i metody kształcenia kompetencji narracyjnej w ujęciu Rity Charon (na przykładzie opowiadania Alice Munro Wiszący most)

Author(s): Marta Chojnacka-Kuraś / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2021

This article presents Rita Charon’s concept of narrative medicine from a technical pointof view. Charon’s training method aims to enhance medical professionals’ sensitivity through close readings of literary texts and to allow doctors and nurses to apply their narrative competence in their medical practice, in their relationship with patients whotell them about their experience of the illness. Using Alice Munro’s short-story “Floating Bridge” as an example, Chojnacka-Kuraś describes the characteristics of the narrative, the temporality and the plot (including the way in which the atypical scenario of the illnessis presented) as well as the transposition of selected analytical steps onto concrete clinical situations.

Świadectwo dzienników choroby (XVIII/XIX w.)

Author(s): Elżbieta Wichrowska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2021

The appearance of the private illness diary at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth century relates to the turn to privacy at that time as well as th progress in the medical sciences, changes in patient care and the popularisation of knowledge of the human body’s functions, hygiene, health and illness. Doctors such as Franz Leopold Lafontaine (1801) advice their patients’ closest relatives to record the course of the illness day by day,even hour by hour. These records, about a dozen pages long each, testify to the writers’ desperate attempt to maintain objectivity while systematically describing changes in the patient’s appearance and mental state and making a note of every physiological function until the patient’s death. These texts represent an overlooked aspect of the emerging private diary, which presents a strongly medicalised description of the human body.

Jedność w bólu

Author(s): Agnieszka Kwiatkowska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2021

Review: Fragmenty dyskursu maladycznego [A Patient’s Discourse: Fragments], ed. by Maciej Ganczar, Ireneusz Gielata, Monika Ładoń, Gdańsk 2019. Medycyna narracyjna: Opowieści o doświadczeniu choroby w perspektywie medycznej i humanistycznej [Narrative Medicine: Stories about Experiencing Illness from the Perspective of Medicine and the Humanities], ed. by Marta Chojnacka-Kuraś, Warsaw 2019.

Więcej niż rany. Nowe spojrzenie na narracyjność, chorobę i ucieleśnione doświadczenie siebie

Author(s): Angela Woods / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2021

During the twentieth century, biomedicine lost its way: the art and humanity of medical practice were lost to rapid scientific advances and new technologies. The medical humanities arose to demonstrate the value and relevance of the arts and humanitiesin making medicine and health care more humane. Wood challenges two dogmas of narrative in the medical humanities and in the field of medicine more broadly. The firstis the claim that we are narrative selves. The second, related dogma is that the best or most healthy way to respond to illness is through narrative.

Polityka i erotyka w Martwym morzu Emila Zegadłowicza

Author(s): Wojciech Śmieja / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2021

Emil Zegadłowicz’s last novel Martwe morze (Dead Sea, 1939) was seen as something of a failure. The first-person narrator, Jan w Oleju Zydla, appears unformed in both social and psychological terms. Sexual desire in the novel has less to do with the partner’s sex than with his or her revolutionary stance. Zydla first directs his revolutionary desire towards his childhood friend Rudolf Istinks, and when this is revealed as a mere projection he turns to the young teacher Stefania, a subletter. She allows him to give a concrete shape to his political revolutionary zeal and to normalise his erotic desire. Śmieja draws on Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick’s notion of homosocial desire and on Susan Sontag’s conceptof fascinating fascism to shed light on what motivated Zegadłowicz to form a fictional universe in which the revolutionary erotisation of the political sphere is inextricably linked to the politisation of the erotic sphere.

Habent sua fata libelli a nawet pojedyncze frazy…

Author(s): Agnieszka Bielak / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2021

Bielak responds to Beata Śniecikowska’s article “TAK odnalezione: Pierwsze czytanie pierwszej jednodniówki polskich futurystów” ([TAK Found Again! A First Reading of the Polish Futurists’ First Pamphlet] Teksty Drugie 2019, no. 3). She polemicises with this work while offering new ways of reading TAK. She also fills an important gap in the sources cited by Śniecikowska.

Jednodniówka TAK – lektura w perspektywie intermedialnej

Author(s): Krystyna Pietrych / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2021

Pietrych polemicises with the literature-centric reading of the Polish Futurists’ first publication and proposes instead a reading rooted in intermedia comparativism and the image turn. Such a method makes it possible to treat the pamphlet TAK as a structurally heterogeneous statement that first harnesses the semantics of typography before engaging the meanings of words. This allows Pietrych to indicate unambiguous meanings of the avant-gardists’ disruptive and innovative manifesto.

Co umarli mogą nam powiedzieć o świecie? O koncepcji nekroestetyki Alexeia Yurchaka

Author(s): Karolina Rosiejka / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2021

Rosiejka examines the agency of the dead body in the context of Alexei Yurchak’s analysis and the concept of necro-aesthetics. According to this scholar, the dead body is temporal, self-defined and most of all useful in the analysis of reality. In contrast to existing research, Rosiejka argues that dead body can be helpful to examine power relations and open this kind of research to new perspectives.

Hashtagging on Instagram: Functions of Hashtags as Employed by #Instagirls

Author(s): Dominika Kováčová / Language(s): English Issue: 8/2019

Hastagging, similarly to tagging, has become an inseparable part of online communication and users’ motivation for employing hashtags—especially on the platform of their origin, i.e. Twitter—has attracted the attention of scholars from various fields, including linguistics. In reference to previous studies, this paper aims to expand existing knowledge regarding the role and functions of hashtags by examining Instagram posts, which are, in contrast to tweets, predominantly visual and remain an insufficiently researched area. The analytical data consisting of posts uploaded by three Instafamous personalities, also known as Instagirls, were scanned for the presence of hashtags to determine their frequency and their characteristic traits. The qualitative analysis of posts shows that on Instagram, hashtags are employed to fulfil one of two opposing goals: 1. to serve as a tool for aggregating posts of similar content; 2. to serve as a resource for creative self-expression. Furthermore, since hashtags are often designated as a means of promoting one’s visibility, their role as a self-presentation strategy in the construction of micro-celebrity on Instagram is also discussed.