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The article discusses the ways in which political and cultural revolution in the 1960s together with such social practices as university open admissions and affirmative action have changed the canon of American literature. It presents the factors that have led to the broadening of the canon and argues that the evolving canon of American literature no longer constructs a teleological meta-narrative of a unified tradition but instead reflects the ways in which multiple traditions and cultures engage in a dialog and influence one another.
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The article aims at determining the specificity of the canonical character of the poetry of Tadeusz Różewicz – one of the most important Polish writers of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century. The perspective is that of continual canonization, corresponding to the multiplicity and dynamism of modern canons, and, eventually, to constant avant-gardisation. The study is divided into four parts relating to four aspects of Różewicz’s transgression. The first part contains a general description of the postulated category of canonical character in the context of Różewicz’s work; the second part describes the type of avant-garde characteristic of the author of Exit; the third is concerned with negative poetics. The fourth part sums up the issue by discussing the most recent selection of Różewicz’s poetry – Znikanie [Disappearance] edited and with a commentary by Jacek Gutorow, himself a poet and literary scholar. The problem of paradoxical continuation based on variability, poetic tradition, and the strategy of external canonization of the writer is discussed resulting in the creation of a new canon of his poems.
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The article considers the problems connected with the idea of fairy tale canon, withattention to the fairy tales from the Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and HouseholdTales) collection by Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm. Instead of a primary fairy tale or canonical fairy tale, the author proposes a concept of a fairy tale module – an imaginary structureconsisting of multiple versions of a single fairy tale which functions in various registersof production and reception (traditional culture, written culture, technological culture).The article also contains a discussion of the fairy tale re-narration based on the contemporarytexts of culture which modify those fairy tales and which are well-rooted in collectiveimagination. The fairy tales basically work as constructs whose shape is determined by othertexts of culture and various media (literature, film, comic books, etc.). The article also notesthe economic dimension of Grimm’s fairy tales which have been present in culture for over200 years and which still remain subject to constant changes – the fact particularly apparentin the area of popular culture.
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The paper focuses on the opinions of two women thinkers: Mary Astell (1666–1731) and Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), whose modern views have been influential since the second half of the 20th century. The aim of the paper is to foreground the originalityin their way of thinking against the background of philosophical views as well as socialand cultural situation in the 17th- and 18th-century England.
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The article aims at examining the canonical categorization of Jhumpa Lahiri’s works, the trajectory of which makes such a categorization difficult if not impossible to establish. The author also focuses on the positive and negative aspects of the emergence of the ethnic canon in the United States, especially on the political and economic facets of literaryproduction. The analysis begins with the theories by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, EdwardSaid, and Homi Bhabha, and proceeds to a more detailed examination of the ethnic canonby David Palumbo-Liu and Graham Huggan.
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An act of creation, as a form of human activity whose aim is to bring new value into the world of art is of processual character. Transgression is one of many possible forms of this process. It is defined as a violent, radical, irreversible act of creation, an emanation of the artist’s freedom which consists in disturbing, transgressing, and breaking social rules, laws, or cultural norms – willfully or not – in order to cause a certain artistic effect whose consequences are unpredictable and remain completely outside of the creator’s control. In the second half of the 20th century, a group of radicals calling themselves Wiener Aktionsgruppe began to dangerously balance on the verge of crime. Art, based on the acts of transgression, acquired a role as a tool of social critique, a total negation of the values represented in the “society of dwarves,” a resistance towards a dysfunctional reality. Aesthetic terrorism was a weapon of provocation, a manifestation of a revolt, an attempt to make any kind of change, or simply a distinct approach to aesthetic value. The paper analyses the creative attitudes of Rudolf Schwarzkogler, Günter Brus, Hermann Nitsch, and Otto Muehl, and the causes and consequences of their transgressions. The author also investigates the evolution of the reception of the Viennese Actionists as an example illustrating the dangerous process of getting accustomed to transgression in the course of a slow assimilation of all artistic extremisms inspired by political interest.
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Spatialization of time, that is, presenting time in the categories of space, measuringand rationalizing it, was a very significant social process at the end of the 20th century. The “spatial turn,” as it is called by Fredric Jameson, is connected with a postmodern individual’simmersion in a perpetual present. The separation of the individual from the past and the future, which has resulted in the deconstruction of the subject’s temporality, was caused by the processes characteristic of late capitalism. Spatialization of time in postmodernism expresses the integrity of space and time, the changing relations between them and their new conceptualizations. These changes are reflected in post-classical cinema that is quite often characterized by modular temporality. The plots of those films are divided into spatio temporal modules whose order is rearranged into a non-chronological syuzhet. Simultaneously, those films depict multifaceted human experience of time and the temporalization of space. Michael and Peter Spierig’s film Predestination (2014) blends the spatialization of time, characteristic of classical cinema, in which space and time are static entities, with post-classical nonlinear arrangement of the plot. Presenting space-time as static modules allows the directors to show subjectivity governed by the categories of space, rather than by the continuity over time. According to David Lewis, the identity of the protagonist, a time traveler, and his/her psychological continuity must be described by means of the differentiation between external time and personal time, because his/her identity relies on operating in spatialized time.
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The article offers a reflection upon Sonia Front’s work oriented towards working out adequate intellectual instrumentarium to address quantum fiction: a phenomenon inspired by the philosophical ramifications of crucial developments in physics in the 20th and 21st centuries. Revolving around her recent monograph titled Shapes of Time in British Twenty-First Century Fiction (2015), the argument of the article aims at shedding light on how Sonia Front arrives at the postulate of a certain order countering chaos within a great hermeneutic circle: w wheel in motion, propelling the constant return from the quantum reality to the reality of discurse, a return in which the overwhelming General impacts the ungraspable Detail and the Detail decides about the shape of the General, the great hologram. Front does itin full awareness of the temporariness of such an order, but despite its transience, she decidesto formulate an academic statement, to tell a „truth” about the world, time, and humanexperience: an experience that inescapably becomes her—and our—share. Presented in such a perspective, quantum consciousness, as postulated by Sonia Front, seems to offer a new promise for the research practice of contemporary scholarship.
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The article contains an introduction to the Polish translation of William Kingdon Clifford’s famous essay The Ethics of Belief. It focuses on the Victorian origins of Clifford’s thought and its relations to other major figures of the time. The historical elements are followed by a reconstruction of Clifford’s main points, including his major evidential thesis according to which “it is [morally] wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.” The most fierce critic of Clifford was William James; his arguments are presented and briefly commented upon with regard to their contemporary relevance. Clifford is usually accused of radicalism by uncharitable readers and critics; the article proposes possible defence against such accusations.
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The North appeared in the work of Russian Symbolists and, through a broader lens, modernists as a “different” world, beyond the limits of space. The attraction of the North can be considered as an alternative to the dilemma relevant to Russia at the turn of the 19th—20th centuries, “East or West”. Unlike the horizontal of socio-cultural and political transformations, in modernism the aspiration to the North was associated with the spiritual vertical, and the journey to the North was a spiritual journey, a way out of the crisis, a search for the absolute and freedom of the spirit. In its extreme manifestation, the attraction to the Pole is attraction towards death. Bryusov’s protagonist, a representative of the “elder” Symbolists, sought to surpass the human, to reach the absolute and to become equal to God. A reckless attraction to the Pole is like passion; in such case Eros and Thanatos are inextricably linked. “Younger” symbolists aimed not beyond the real world, but for the transformation of reality and the birth of a new man. The north was the territory of initiation by them, an important part of the dedication, the solar world. Instead of the unattainable “Queen of the night”, the hero is accompanied by Solveig, the bearer of love-caritas. The hero could pass initiation (A. Remizov), but he didn’t always stand the test (A. Bely). Gradually, the “northern” motif shifted from the mythological to the biographical domain, and the name Solveig itself (or other Ibsen’s female characters) became a cultural sign. The modernist myth about the North as a “different” world is initially ambivalent.
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This paper analyzes Miriam Katin’s graphic memoir Letting It Go by using the concept of multidirectional memory as coined by Michael Rothberg, arguing that this is a narration that uncovers multiple perspectives on a traumatic event, with an ethical purpose in mind. The focus is on the novel way in which this is achieved given the specific modes of graphic narration. I analyzes the literary modes behind the narrative in order to show the overlap of the narrator I, narrated I, and protagonist, and I unveil the graphic modes of the narrative as powerful tools that shape perspective and yield subjectivity.
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