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In the article I wonder about the reasons for the growing popularity of the postapocalypticworks in the pop culture of the early 21st century. The world after the collapseof the Western civilization is created in various literary, film and photographic forms, theexamples of which I present in my study. The alternative post-apocalyptic reality is the postindustrialreality, archaized and non-anthropocentric. The technological regress presented inthe works is based on imaginings of the end and is analogous to the fall of humanity amongthose people who survived after the “end” or were born afterwards. In the post-apocalypticworks of the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries it can be noticed that the authors of the visionof world “after to end” abandoned an extremely negative tone.
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The article discusses the issue of development of views on an atomic bomb and a nuclearwar created by scientists, politicians, military commanders, as well as civilian strategists,starting from the vision of an atomic bomb as a herald of the New Deal, social and political,till the American military plans of a nuclear attack on hundreds of targets in the Soviet Union. The aim of the study is to demonstrate that the nuclear revolution which involvednot only to military matters, but also strategy, international policy or war ethics was primarilylinked to, apart from new technology, the idea of the future nuclear war and how its range,course and consequences were imagined.
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The article presents an analysis of humorous genres of contemporary Polish, Russianand Czech folklore (jokes, sadistic poems, chastushka), inspired by real or anticipated tragicevents related to the use of nuclear energy. The purpose of comparing the texts in threelanguages was to identify common or different motivations which contributed to writing thetexts of atomic humour in the countries with various degrees of advancement of nuclearweapons. The analysis is based on the texts of jokes (approx. 200) found in the Internet(the Polish, Russian and Czech servers), materials spread through spoken communication,and non-serial publications. The analysis proved that the fear motivating the atomic jokes isnot caused by the fear of the atomic technology itself, but by the fear of irresponsible peopleand irreversibility of their unreasonable actions.
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The aim of the article is to analyse a short story by Franz Kafka In the Penal Colony(In der Strafkolonie). At the beginning, the circumstances surrounding the creation of thenovel were described. After that the images of the colonizers (Officer, Explorer) andthe colonized (Condemned, Soldier) were presented. Thereafter, the process of justice andmechanism of execution – the use of an elaborate torture device that carves the sentenceof the prisoner on his skin – were interpreted. In the last part of the article the attitude ofKafka towards process of decolonization was described.
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The article discusses the issue of the return of the forgotten poets as a function of the literary paradigm subjected to changes at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. In the light of such a view, the crisis in the development of poetry would be one of the factors letting the forgotten poets’ voice be heard. Another one seems to be the alienation of late 19th-century authors seeking or involuntarily finding partners for a dialogue in tradition, not in contemporary times. The text raises the subject of the sacredness of the poetic word, referring it both to the socio-literary realities of the turn of the centuries and to the broadly defined tradition. In the paper, the author focuses on Cyprian Norwid (and his reader, Zenon Przesmycki) and Stefan George (for whom Stephane Mallarmé turns out to be an important poetic reference).
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In the Romantic period, death and resurrection belonged to the most important categoriesof artistic reflection. Norwid also explored the thanatic and resurrection topics, however hewas more interested in the aesthetic dimension than the theological aspect of returning frombeyond the grave, namely how the values of truth, goodness and beauty initially become thecause of the artist’s suffering to become later a guarantee of his immortality. From the firstemigration poem titled “Adam Krafft” till late works, the poet presented the fate of artistsand the works they created as the operative substance for testing the destruction and rebirthprinciple. Norwid believed that his work, which transcended the rigid confines and obsessionsof its own era, would resurrect in the future.
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Cyprian Norwid was considered by many researchers a poet of Polish Romanticism.The author of Vade-mecum was ahead of the times in which he lived, announcing andcontesting the upcoming modernité at the same time. The aim of the article is not, however,to sum up research conducted so far on the modernity of Norwid’s work, but to show why lateRomanticism is such an important category of description of the phenomenon of the authorof Vade-mecum and what links his works created in the 1860s and 1880s with the manifestosof the birth of new poetry at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.
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The article collects information on Norwid’s works found in recent years. The mostimportant discoveries include song lyrics [“Blade kwiaty na odłogu...”], two Norwid’s lettersto Julia Pusłowska and an original death certificate of the poet. As to the art works, unknowngraphics (6 pieces) and one watercolor of rare beauty (Pythia) were revealed at the auctions.Most of these works enriched the collection of the Museion Norwid Foundation. In theuniversity library in Illinois, a copy of Divine Comedy, given by the poet to NumaŁepkowski, was found. Another important item for Norwidology is a family photo albumbelonging to Maria de Bonneval née Gerlicz acquired for the collection of the Bloch FamilyFoundation, which included photos of over 70 people whom Norwid knew. The article alsoinforms about fakes and works whose authorship cannot be credibly attributed to Norwid.
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The article focuses on a lesser-known issue regarding the reception of Norwid’s work andat the same time it goes beyond the perspective of reception research and points to severalsignificant relationships between thought, aesthetics, literary sensitivity and intellectualbiography of both authors. The perspective assumed here is then partly comparative, andpartly reconstructing more or less obvious inspirations. Irzykowski rarely wrote about Norwidor referred to him (the issue of incomprehensibility is best known), while many of hisconcepts are worth confrontation with Norwid’s analogical ideas. Moreover, in many casesthe author of Quidam seems to be a silent adversary of Irzykowski, unnamed, but coreflectingin the margins of the text. Undoubtedly, both of them meet at key points as to theirunderstanding of tragedy, irony, and the “pałuba” [hag] element, which is one of the mostimportant concepts of Irzykowski, has its discursive counterparts in Norwid’s reflection.
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This paper focuses on the symbolic role attributed to Cyprian Norwid (1821–1883) inthe young poets’ and critics’ circle gathered around the right-wing conspiracy journal Artand Nation (1942–1944) in occupied Warsaw. They used a paraphrase of Norwid’s words,“The artist is the organizer of national imagination”, in order to emphasize their aim of anautonomous and at the same time nationally committed art. However, in many statementsby Andrzej Trzebiński (1922–1943) and Wacław Bojarski (1921–1943), the term “nation”appears to be more of a performative gesture than a reference to a consistent, historicallyevolving reality, as conceived of by Norwid. It was only in the 1944 essay “History and Deed”, never to be printed in the underground, that the circle’s foremost poet Tadeusz Gajcy (1922–1944) critically revisited anti-traditional activism and championed a genuinely “Norwidian”, contemplation-based understanding of creativity.
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The author argues that a role of Zenon Przesmycki in the process of bringing backCyprian Norwid to the Polish literary life is slightly overestimated. At the turn of the 19th andthe 20th centuries on the Polish lands, the reception of French symbolism took place, whichdetermined the perception of the author of Vade-mecum working in Paris (since 1849) asa great precursor of intellectual “visual poetry”. However, by making Norwid a strictlyRomantic poet, the generation of the Young Poland artists effectively distanced themselvesfrom artistic borrowings associated with Baudelaire, Verlaine, etc., thus obtaining the effectof the “nativeness” of modern Polish poetry at that time.
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The study is devoted to personological analysis of the one-hundred-poem collectionentitled Vade-mecum by Cyprian Norwid in the light of advanced and, above all, multidimensionalresearch on the personology of the subject of creative activities of EmilyDickinson’s poems. Based to a large extent on Robert Weisbuch’s complex terminology fromthe canonical volume Emily Dickinson’s Poetry, using his typology of lyrical personas, theresearcher on Norwid gains important, additional comparative literature tool allowing, e.g.the juxtaposition alongside each other of the types of poetry written by Norwid, Dickinsonand Baudelaire (Norwid’s and Dickinson’s lyrical persona is – it seems – a mixture ofa “wounded dialectician” and “engaging sufferer”, Baudelaire’s persona is, in turn, themarriage of features of an “engaging sufferer” and “withdrawn bard”). This is how the premodernist“theatre of personas” is created, the stronger that – which I am trying to emphasizein this text – despite appearances, it is possible to find similarities in the poetic languagebetween the works of Norwid and Dickinson. In the same way, Norwid and Dickinson – inorder to build their lyric – use a poetic function in the Jakobsonian sense: on the one hand,they strengthen and intensify its impact, on the other hand, they use it to “cover up” thephenomenon of linguistic disintegration of the world for which Modernist lyric poetryserved in a special way as a detector, a kind of litmus paper.
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The author proposes a reflection on discovering the poet with regard to his creationor construction. This issue is discussed on the example of Emily Dickinson’s works whichwere published only after her death and were not prepared for print by the author herself.In the light of the latest research on the material dimension of her legacy (starting fromVirginia Jackson’s study Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading from 2005 to therecently published collection The Gorgeous Nothings. Emily Dickinson’s Envelope Poems),it appears that many of Dickinson’s works were not written in a form that could be recognizedas poetic at first glance. A large part was preserved only in notebooks, loose sheets coveredwith handwriting written in continuo or at odd angles, in a manner adapted to the format ofa given scrap of paper, usually a free fragment of a recycled envelope or a torn-off cornerof a piece of paper used previously for a different purpose. These texts had to be recognizedthen by discoverers as poems, and then copied and edited in a way consistent with whatwas considered lyric poetry in the era. Some of them were then rejected as not falling intothe category of poetry and included in the opus of the American only by later researchers.Others, in the first editions treated as poems with time were excluded by historians ofliterature from this collection. Contrary to the provocative title, the aim of the article isnot to answer the question about the status of the texts left by Dickinson. Instead, the authorreflects on the poetic criteria ascribed to her works by the first and subsequent readers.
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The article presents the literary descriptions of dreams, which were publishedin the Russian periodicals of the Enlightenment period: 1. The happy society:a dream by Alexander Sumarokov (“Trudolubivaya pchela”, 1759), 2. A dream bySergey Domashnev (“Poleznoye uveselenye”, 1761), 3. A dream by Ivan Bakhtin,A dream by Timofey Voskresensky and A dream by Ivan Trunin (“Irtysh, prevrashchaiushchiisiav Ippokrenu”, 1789–1790). The works present an image ofa good ruler, a happy society and an educational role of poetry.
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The source for research in this article are adaptations of dogmatic andmoralizing texts printed in Basilians typography in 18th century. Examined textshave Polish, Latin and Orthodox Church language origin. Their role in shapingthe Ukrainian literary language and style typical of Ukrainian religious literaturewas studied. Analyses of their influence on the formation of recipients, and in thiscontext the process of shaping the identity of the Uniates, shows Eastern andWestern influences.
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Feature of oeuvre of Marina Tsvetaeva – the predominance of the motive ofdeath. Henry Gorchakov discovers this topic in sixty percent of the poet’s worksof M.Tsvetaeva. Naturally, reflections on death are accompanied by reflectionson life. The article analyzes the peculiarities of development of Tsvetaeva’s work ofanother constant motive – the motive of life, the concept of which is found outin a complex metaphysical context of thinking. Particular attention is paid to the diversity of approaches to understanding life and their changes. At the same time,the poet does not develop his own philosophy of life, focusing on the world ofexperiences, on the one hand, or on a holistic and volatile reality, on the other.
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The article discusses two novels of modern Russian writer Aleksandr Terekhov– Каменный мост (Stone Bridge) and Немцы (Germans). The main aim of the articleis trying to find the answer to a question how a book can be riveting and unsavoryat the same time. Both books were appreciated by readers and critics and wonliterary awards – first in 2009 and the second in 2012. Both are very difficult toread because of the author’s specific style – combination of realistic message withmodernist stream of consciousness. The writer’s style comprises also a great dose ofcynicism and poisonous irony. The first novel is a sort of a journalist’s investigationand concerns the tragic accident from the Stalinist past. The second can be calleda pastiche of an occupational novel and a critical look at the corruption in clericalsystem in Russia.
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The development of education, which in the 18th century was available not only to boys, but also girls from wealthy bourgeois families, as well as the development of publishing houses and specialised bookstores with books for children (the first of them was founded by John Newbery) caused the phenomenon of children and teenagers’ ‘eager reading’. The introduction of free access for children to library collections at the American public library in Pawtucket, Rhode Island (1877), turned out to be the ‘Copernican revolution’. The idea was introduced to many American and European libraries. From that time on, children and teenage readers had a real influence not only on the selection of their own readings, but also on the profile, subjects and nature of newly-created books. At the same time, the opposite phenomenon intensified: adult writers and educators tried to control the readings of younger generation. The catalogues of books for children and adolescents created during nearly half a century (1884–1929), evaluated the didactic values of readings, but ignored their literary qualities.
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The analyses are based on teachers’ memoirs and autobiographical narratives that havebeen collected as a result of subsequent editions of research conducted between 1989 and2016. These narratives show the problems, tensions and transformations in education,and in the role of a teacher in Poland over the past 30 years. Changes seen through theeyes of successive generations of teachers, against the background of their life history andprofessional experiences and achievements, are a record of the changes that took placeduring the system transformation. They may be the evidence of an inevitable generationalchange in the teaching profession and teacher community. Research shows that thegeneration born in the 1950s and 1960s, involved in the democratic changes in Poland atthe turn of the 1980s and 1990s, is leaving the teaching profession. This generationparticipated in the “Solidarity” social movement. Its members were brought up and educatedin the sense of a strong social commitment, the so-called ethos. Currently, young teachersborn in the 1990s and later enter the profession. They belong to the generation of free,democratic Poland, which has a more pragmatic attitude to life and professional work ineducation. This is the generation of the internet, unlimited choice, and open global accessto information and goods. The implications of such findings are discussed in the article.
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