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The question whether it is possible to view the discourse of the body present in the fabliaux as a manifestation of medieval pornography is the starting point for the discussion of what might have constituted the medieval sense of political correctness. The author briefly examines medieval perspectives on sexuality and sinfulness, which the Church Fathers constructed around the notions of potentiality and actuality. This, in turn, provides an analogy with the pornographic discourse of the fabliaux, where the potentiality of sin becomes actualized by the act of communication. Thus a correlation between pornography and speech in the fabliaux is also a correlation between sinfulness and a sense of political correctness. In this way, then, medieval sexuality shaped cultural correctness and medieval correctness shaped medieval cultural sexuality. However, both medieval pornographic discourse and medieval political incorrectness, so often represented by the former, could have only taken place in the sphere of the potential rather than the actual. In other words, what was politically incorrect in medieval pornography, was only so within the politically correct impositions of the discourse of social or literary norms.
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The central issue of the present dialog is the ambivalence of the phenomenon of „political correctness”. Located in the liminal space between the political discourse of the state and the ethical discourse of individual choices, political correctness, originally postulated as a means to inflect political debates with a modicum of civility, has since morphed into a discursive construct of many faces. In certain contexts, the central concept of the present debate manifests its nature as an obvious tool of power, or becomes a label connoting political or social hypocrisy. At the same time, however, the deliberate application of the now-negative term frequently serves the purpose of disqualifying behaviors, gestures or discourses that are ethically sound, but „inconveniently” reveal the logic of the speaker’s agenda, imperil his/her goals, or deconstruct the elementary distinctions upon which his/her discourse relies. Thus, the dynamics of the present dia-logos of „political correctness” not only indicates that central to the understanding of the amorphous character of the concept is the awareness of the purposes to which its applications may cater, but also, perhaps more importantly, it provides a stimulus for further debates concerning ethics in the context of dominant metanarratives marginalizing other, possibly „discomforting”, discourses.
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The essay examines Jerzy Kosiński’s novel "The Painted Bird" in the context of the author’s biography (Kosiński’s war-time experiences) and its diverse receptions in Poland and the United States. The ideologies of Political Correctness and multiculturalism have prevented American scholars and the public from relating to the Polish perspective on the book and the events it purports to represent. In conclusion to his analysis, Kevin Hannan states: „The Painted Bird suggests a deceptive distortion of Polish history in the twentieth century, and the book demeans those Poles who risked their lives to save and shelter Jews such as Jerzy Kosinski”.
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