Славянският текст на „Глави с акростих“ от преп. Григорий Синаит

Author(s): Petko Petkov / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 103/2018

“Chapters with acrostich” is the main treatise of Gregory Sinaïta, one of the pillars of Hesychasm in the 13th and 14th centuries. The text was composed on Mount Athos or in Paroria and was probably translated into Slavonic before the death of the hermit. It is preserved in a number of copies, one of the earliest is in manuscript no. 214 from the Zographou Monastery Library. A typical feature of the Slavonic version is that the text is divided into 142 chapters while the Greek version has 137. The Slavonic version has served as the basis for the text published by Paisii Velichkovski in his Dobrotolyubie (Philokalia).

Редки думи и хапакси в Учително евангелие на Константин Преславски

Author(s): Zheny Zhikova / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 103/2018

This paper is dedicated to rare words and hapax legomena used in the Didactic Gospel (Homiliary) of Constantine of Preslav, a medieval Bulgarian writer and translator, one of the most important men of letters working at the Preslav Literary School at the end of the 9th and the beginning of the 10th century. The lexemes are given in the form of dictionary articles. Being “rare” is considered every word attested in up to fi ve sources apart from the Didactic Gospel (according to the lexicographical sources used as well as indices of words of published medieval sources and the research of the author of this paper). These rare words are viewed in the context of writings that are regarded as originating from the Old Bulgarian period (late 9th–11th c.) but surviving in later copies. As a result of this largescale comparison, it is established with which Old Bulgarian texts Constantine’s Homiliary shows the greatest lexical proximity.

Особености на българската преводна книжнина в османския контекст на XIX век

Author(s): Nadezhda Alexandrova / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 103/2018

This article presents a comparative study on two levels. The theoretical one is inspired by the concept of “entangled histories” that operates on a supranational level for making cross-cultural parallels. The second level presents a case study of the reception of the French novel Les janissaires by Alphonse Royer in five languages – Greek, Romanian, Bulgarian, Karamanli, and Armenian, which took place in the Ottoman context from the 1840s to the 1870s. The goal of the study is to illustrate how under the same political reign the cultural transfer enabled a circulation of notions and an appropriation of new civilizational practices between different communities that later incorporated those notions in their nationalist discourses.

Pitanje klasifikatora u znakovnim jezicima

Author(s): Branimir Belaj,Barbara Majdenić / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 2/2018

Classifiers in sign languages have the status of linguistic universals and are productive constructions that describe various aspects of referents and their relationship with other elements in a scenario. Classifiers can be divided into four groups: entity classifiers, handling classifiers, size and shape specifiers, and body part classifiers. Each group has a schematic semantic pole which determines the nature of the whole construction. The schematic semantic pole of entity classifiers can be defined as [THING IN RELATION], the schematic semantic pole of handling classifiers as [THING AS ELEMET OF PROCESS], that of size and shape specifiers can be defined as [DIMENSIONS OF THINGS] and of body part classifiers as [PART OF A THING]. The higher degree of iconicity of classifiers derives mainly from the visual nature of sign languages, but the selection of distinctive scenes is always arbitrary. Even though they are productive units, classifiers can become lexical units through lexicalization.

Uwagi o kondycji dwudziestopierwszowiecznej polszczyzny z perspektywy procesów globalizacyjnych

Author(s): Anetta Bogusława Strawińska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 6/2018

My goal in writing this article is not so much to provide a synthetic description of the basic directions of transformation of modern Polish brought on by globalisation, but to indicate the most important effects of the Americanisation of Polish in the 21st century. In general, one tangible effect of globalisation on the Polish language is on one hand to the borrowing of Anglo-American lexemes, phrases, or word order (e.g. sport telegram, play lista, radio reklama). On the other hand there is the adaptation of internationally used Anglo-American terms (e.g. roaming – pol. roamingowy, SMS – pol. esemesik, esemesek, esemeśnik, esemesiara), as well as increasing the range and number of composite words by creating new structures based on borrowed words (e.g. derivatives with the prefix cyber-, e-, euro-, sex-, narco-). The authors of the canon linguistic works see the most important causes of borrowing from American English into Polish in: comfort, frequency of occurrence and use of Anglo-American vocabulary, the need to name new designates and terms, the dominance of English in business and its prestige. The predicted effects of the Americanisation of Polish include: a fashion for such borrowings, adaptation of an American point of view and cultural signifiers, carnivalisation of culture and “Ponglish” (P. Korcz, M. Matulewski, “Wpływ globalizacji na powstanie polsko-angielskiego pidżynu zawodowego,” Język. Komunikacja. Informacja 2006, no. 1, pp. 83-84).

A Piece of Fedora Cake: The Male-Centric Imagination of Jerzy Andrzejewski and the Scholarly Reconnaissance

Author(s): Wojciech Śmieja / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2017

In this article Śmieja suggests that Jerzy Andrzejewski’s male-centred imagination is rooted in the writer’s homoerotic desire. By imagining relationships between men that take place outside of the Oedipal model, Andrzejewski’s works threaten both the social order and the coherence of the subject himself. In order to stabilize his male-centred vision on a textual level, Śmieja argues, Andrzejewski draws on the model developed by Witold Gombrowicz, while on a biographical level it is Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński who fulfils this stabilizing function.

Excessive Masculinity: Boxer Narratives in Holocaust Literature

Author(s): Paweł Wolski / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2017

This article examines boxer narratives in Polish and international Holocaust literature in order to reveal the function of masculinity within the ontology of sports. Wolski uses the example of Roger Repplinger’s Leg dich, Zigeuner, a double biography of the German footballer Otto (“Tull”) Harder, member of the Waffen-SS, Wachmann and later com¬mander at the German concentration camps, and German Sinto boxer Johann “Rukeli” Trollmann, who faced discrimination on ethnic grounds and was later killed in one of the camps. The biographies of these two individuals show a marked difference in the way in which masculinity functioned within Nazi ideology. In the case of Harder, masculinity is an immanent category, while Trollmann’s masculinity appears as contingent. The boxer’s strategy of avoiding direct confrontation in the ring was perceived as “unmanly,” leading to his exclusion from the community of men.

Affective Studies in Poland: Probing the Field

Author(s): Ryszard Nycz / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2017

Introduction to the issue of Teksty Drugie devoted to affective studies in literature, art and culture. The author points to three major characteristics of this approach. First, its manifest-like form (i.e. pursuing a narrow – affective – research project in order to expose the cognitive profit of such an undertaking on the expenses of a partial and biased image. Secondly, it subscribes to a certain methodological “turn”, as descriptive categories turn into analytical procedures transforming traditional shape of the whole discipline in question. Thirdly, it is an inherent element of the generic understanding of culture as a creative activity, which brings to life phenomena which would remain obscure without its external and caring intervention.

Poetry and the Ritual: Poems for Bolesław Bierut’s 60th Birthday

Author(s): Michał Głowiński / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2016

The Author as a Brand

Author(s): Dominik Antonik / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2016

The article deals with contemporary autofiction on the example of Michał Witkowski’s works, which allows to describe the change in literature’s functioning on the field of culture and social communication. Witkowski’s work, marketing practices and public activity are presented here as elements of transmedia space of self-creation, which can be navigated. The author claims that literature is reified and plays an important role in an intense media landscape where, according to Lash and Lury, it becomes a material element of reality. This leads to a conclusion that each meeting with thus understood literature is an experience of the intensity of an author as a virtual identity, quality or brand which come into existence through the writer’ s actual activities.

Publishing Circulation Systems versus the Book Market in Today’s Poland

Author(s): Marcin Rychlewski / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2016

A proposed description of today’s publishing movement in Poland, drawn using primarily the distribution key. A ‘main’ popular/commercial circulation is discerned along with three lesser-reach profiled circulations’. Following Przemysław Czapliński, the former is called a ‘book-trail’ [Polish, książkostrada] and identified with the dominant chains such as EMPiK.’Profiled circulations’ (i.e. scientific, religious and literary) are compared to local roads from any of which you can enter the publishing ‘highway’ as well. The closer the distribution centre, the larger the heterogeneity and dispersion of what is inside there – and, the other way round: the closer the peripheries, the stronger the uniformity and specialisation of offer. It is also proposed that former ‘vertical’ metaphors with which socio-literary phenomena have been described, be replaced by ‘horizontal’ ones. The ‘high-artistic’ and ‘popular’ circulations do not form an expressive opposition today; neither does the system of ‘main circulation’ vs. ‘profiled circulations’. Moreover, in the author’s s opinion, the notion of ‘literary circulations’ has become problematic in itself – and ought to be replaced by ‘publishing circulations’. Only in the latter’ s content should participation of literature in the book market as a whole be investigated.

Sociological Contexts of Liberature

Author(s): Katarzyna Bazarnik / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2016

This article analyses the situation of liberature in the field of literary production. It presents a historical outline of the phenomenon, starting with Zenon Fajfer’s proposal of a new literary genre. Bazarnik then contextualizes liberature with the sociological turn in bibliography, which demonstrated that “strong” authors striving to maintain their autonomy in the literary field paid attention to the semantically charged, intentionally shaped bibliographic code of their books. Finally, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s mechanisms of consecration as well as modern sociolinguistic and rhetorical theories of genre, she describes liberature as a new form of literary communication that can be conceptualised in terms of genre understood as the horizon of expectations.

Academic (Non)Reading from the Perspective of “User Friendliness:” an Insight from the Fields of the Sociology of Literature and of Multimedia

Author(s): Piotr Toczyski / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2016

This article discusses data that is usually difficult to find but sometimes becomes publicly accessible, facilitating reflection on the current transformation of the humanities within Polish academia. The data was collected during classes at metropolitan universities in 2013, when over 700 students of law and other humanities individually responded to auditorium questionnaires. To account for the results of the study, the researchers suggest the categories of “non-reading” and of “ease of access”. Studies of (non)reading in Poland from 2012 form the backdrop for this investigation.

“Degenerate” Forum of Małgorzata Musierowicz’s Fans as an Interactive Interpretative Machine: a Case Study

Author(s): Olga Dawidowicz-Chymkowska / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2016

The aim of the article is to show the rules governing literary interpretation within the Internet forum. The author concentrates in particular on these conditions which enable the co-existence in the discussion at least two different types of discourses on literature, one of which is based on confessing the subjective reading experience and the other on the effort to negotiate a common interpretation within a scope of acceptable readings. The interaction on the forum has been shown as a trigger for some effective interpretative mechanisms leafing to ways of framing discussed texts in an interesting way. The author has also highlighted the risk of interpretative abuses characteristic of the forum discussions and described it as anethical problem.

Where Codes Meet: On the Literary Uses of Iconic Signs

Author(s): Grzegorz Grochowski / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2015

Combination of Word and Image has been recently made part of literary works, with increasing frequency (e.g. novel narratives or lyrical monologues). In such cases, image becomes part of the utterance itself, finding a place for itself in a certain sender-receiver relationship arrangement, thus also becoming a pole of various meaning-generating tensions and an integral part of the entire work.The article aims at discussing the role that images, i.e. iconic signs, play in the structure of artistic pieces of this sort. The main focus is on the multiple semiotic games whose basis is the clash of differing sign-based orders, world-representing forms and communicativeconventions. Analysis of selected pieces aims at showing the multiplicity of possible functions ascribed to visual elements as part of verbal text. A comparison of the achievements of a few selected writers is also convincing of how mutually remote positions were assumed by artists against the significative value of iconic sings (from affirmation, criticism, through to problematisation).The condition for the reader to understand the arrangement s/he comes across is, therefore, to find its suspected motivations, to discover the premises providing the grounds for such a course of presentation, and, to formulate a hypothesis restoring the coherency of a text being based upon two incommensurable orders of meaning.

The PRL in Biographies: Preliminary Remarks

Author(s): Grzegorz Wołowiec / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2016

The past of the People’s Republic of Poland still seems to be an incomplete object of the scholarly debate, whose most heated episodes concern the biographies of particular participants of this history. The article discusses the discursive rules which determine the shape of contemporary biographic representations. The author analyses two dominant and conflicting narrative strategies: consensual and antagonistic. He points to their genesis, political pragmatics as well as the outcome for the presentation of history. The biography of Ryszard Kapuściński, written by Artur Domosławski, serves as a case study of extremely difficult conditions of the biographic writing which struggle to transgress the existing interpretative frameworks.

O najstarszych polskich przekładach literatury słowackiej

Author(s): Lucyna Spyrka / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2018

Based on J. Jarniewicz’s concept of two types of translator’s attitude: legislator and ambassador, the article concentrates on the reasons behind the oldest Polish translations of Slovak literature: a folk song, part of J. Rostworowski’s novel „Zamek na Czorsztynie”, a novel by J. Kalinčiak „Reštavracia” translated by P. Stalmach and a drama „Matka” by J. Gregor Tajovsky translated by F. Gwiżdż, showing the circumstances of their appearance and the attitudes of their translators.

Patrząc wspólnie w kierunku jedynego Boga

Author(s): / Language(s): English,Polish Issue: 1/2018

Jewish Anti-Christian Polemical Treatises in Early Modern Central and Eastern Europe: Where are They?

Author(s): Daniel J. Lasker / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2018

Jewish anti-Christian polemical treatises comprise a well-known genre in medieval Jewish literature. It is generally thought that these books were written in response to Christian missionary pressure. Yet, when considering eastern Europe in the early modern period, one sees that this genre is almost non-existent, despite continuing Christian attempts at converting Jews. An analysis of medieval Jewish anti-Christian writings shows that rather than being necessarily a response to Christian missionary pressure, many of them are part of the larger Jewish theological enterprise. Hence, such works are prevalent in areas where Jews engaged in theology – the Islamic world, Iberia, Provence, and Italy – and almost non-existent in northern Europe (Ashkenaz), where there was little interest in theology. This pattern continued into the early modern period, at which time Ashkenazic Jews still produced almost no anti-Christian polemical works. The most important early modern, eastern European anti-Christian book, the very popular Faith Strengthened, was written by a Lithuanian Karaite Isaac of Troki (died 1594), reinforcing our knowledge that eastern European Karaite Jews did not share the Ashkenazi intellectual ethos of their Rabbanite neighbors.

The Role of the Jew in Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont’s Adumbratio kabbalae christianae

Author(s): Sheila Spector / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2018

While the use of the Jews as scapegoats is well documented, less noted is how they have provided a pretext for exploring and writing about heterodoxical ideas that otherwise might cause problems for the author. A case in point is the Adumbratio kabbalae christianae, by seventeenth-century esoteric thinker Franciscus Mercusius van Helmont. Although ostensibly designed to convert the Jews, a close examination reveals that the text was intended to inform like-minded Christians about an esoteric mode of thought that, at the time, was repudiated by Church authorities.