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…Nevertheless, together with the very first pronounced word, one human being declared war on the other and his behaviour in the course of thousands of years changed only in that he prefers to eat with a fork and a knife and to use toilets with running water. Is he that narrowminded? Is he to such an extent not the master of his deeds, of his destiny, of his own thoughts? Why should I then believe in the free will or in the alteration of the unavoidabilities? There must be something after all that also depends from us. If this were not the case, any sense of morality, of the fine mechanics of human coexistence, any sense at all would indeed be lost. And I am incapable of getting used to the thought that in the final consequence it is the human being after all who tunes this extraordinariely fine instrument. Instinctively and consciously. Thus, he can never in his life jump out of the shadow of his responsability. Because responsability is his own shadow. Whether he believes in the free will or not.
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Henri-René Lenormand refreshed theatre, defining a new domain for it: the mysteries of the human soul. In all of his plays, he strived to explain the secret of internal life, as well as to solve the mystery that people are to themselves. Therefore, dramaturgy was for the author of La Folle du Ciel not only a means of literary expression, but also a kind of therapy, enabling him to combat his depression. In this article, three plays are discussed: Le Temps est un songe, Les Ratés, and Le Lâche, in which the French playwright diagnosed cases of melancholia by describing the psychotic world from the perspectives of the suffering protagonists. He presented them in closure, isolated from the rest of the world, suffocating in claustrophobic rooms under mansard roofs which symbolised their strained mental conditions. Apart from physical walls, in Lenormand’s works there is also the invisible to the eye yet pervasive “black wall”, in front of which a human being stands completely defenceless and mentally broken, trying to find in it even the slightest crack enabling them to escape the delusional world.
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Latin America is a continent where for centuries various walls of ethnic, class, and political divisions were erected and demolished. Cubans, for whom the once paradise island became a cage, are a society which painfully experienced what those walls are as well as what isolation is. The aim of the article was to discuss the way in which Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, a writer who belongs to the first generation of Cubans who grew up in the Revolutionary reality, creates the literary space of Havana by depicting the everyday lives of its inhabitants. In the novel titled Nothing to Do [Nada que hacer] (1998), the invisible yet terribly tangible walls dividing Havana into zones of influence of various social groups, and the disintegrating walls and ceilings of flats are not the only proof of the universal poverty – they also seem to constitute a metaphor of the relations of power within the society and of the condition of its spirit. Furthermore, the author indicates how a conscious individual tries to build around themselves an intellectual wall which could separate them from the void which deprives one of the will to act. The analysis was based on the concept of mobility by Zygmunt Bauman and John Urry, on a study by Elżbieta Rybicka regarding the sensory literary geography, and on a discussion by Javier del Prado Biezma of the methods for presenting space in literature.
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Through a simple wall, a transparent element of everyday life, Stanisław Grochowiak’s poems enable one to uncover the existential concrete element, matter endowed with an amazing hypnagogic potential, a chronicle of ‘objectness’. In the poet’s imagined world, the wall constitutes both an empirical item and a phenomenon, which transcends the ontology of matter, which determines its semantic fluidity: at one point it resembles an anthropological document (a place of cultural/biographical inscription) only to, a moment later, resemble the basis for surrealist visions or the material of an artifact. The wall seems to be the limit of the zone of mental comfort or, e.g., expose the in-body plane, which, like the walls of pre-historic caves, is covered with archetypal images from (the) childhood (of humanity). This study, based on contexts in art history, psychoanalysis, and a material turn, is an attempt at identifying the references which focus “on the wall” in the following works: “Płonąca żyrafa”, “Malarstwo”, “Zejście”, and “Ars Poetica”.
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From a broad philological perspective, involving West/East culture, literature, philosophy, history, this paper highlights the mechanisms of literary representation and identity specificity in the interplay of constructed Chinese American images of „the Self” and „the Other” in Amy Tan’s latest novel The Valley of Amazement. The application of imagological methodology opens new vistas in researching Chinese American literature at the different stages of its formation. Imagological approach to the study of Amy Tan’s novel, based on comparative literary analysis, allows revealing the multiple dimensions of Chinese American identity through unveiling such categories as „Chineseness”, „Americanness”, „American Chineseness”, involving cross-cultural intertextuality and narrative intermediality. The emphasis is placed on literary representation of Chinese American images and synthesis of various cultural images and identities in portraying the changing nature of American Chineseness. The research is conducted with reference both to cultural, historical contextualization in the study of Chinese American images as dynamic results of cultural interaction of Chinese and American and in-depth analysis of the image qua image. Cultural globalization that has recently become a topic, much debated in literary circles, has resulted in the creation of a fictional character, unrestricted by ethnic, cultural, and territorial boundaries. This is the main protagonist of The Valley of Amazement, Violet Minturn. Her image has deeply personal, author-related meanings, and the paper investigates another dimension of American Chineseness, from identity resistance to identity transgression.
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The purpose of the study was to distinguish groups of believers according to the type of religiosity. This investigation is based on the personal approach and focuses on the problem of differentiation of groups of religious personalities who are young. Psychodiagnostic research was carried out only in the classrooms designated of the educational institutions. Based on the analysis of western literature, the differences between the types of religiosity of young believers ("quasi-religious," "moderately religious," "truly religious") were determined. Procedure of hierarchical cluster analysis allowed indicating empirical referents of the concept "type of religiosity". The differences between the groups were empirically confirmed, using the method of psychodiagnostic.
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