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The author - reporter for the BBC for decades - recalls his memories on Király street, important commercial centre of Pest before the second war. He also collects literary data.
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The article contains a generic analysis of a traditional South African farm novel (plaasroman) including current reception of this genre within contemporary post-colonial fiction. A classic plaasroman was based on social values such as nationalism, racism and patriarchalism, which constituted a sense of national identity of the Boers, but also became the basis of the institutionalized racial discrimination. For this reason, the main narrative theme of plaasroman has been critically rewritten by the writers who contested colonial authority. These reinterpretations are being discussed based on three examples — Life and Times of Michael K. by J. M. Coetzee, The grass is singing by Doris Lessing and The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer.
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The author’s objective is to discuss two different genres of the seventeenth century ephemeral papers which Konrad Zawadzki, the researcher of the origins of the Polish press, has included in a common group of so called “ephemeral newspapers”. The author of the article distinguishes, among those texts, extensive moralistic treatises, characterised by painstaking composition, expanded descriptive and instructive plots and domination of informative and didactic functions. In the seventeenth century, side by side with them the papers of small volume were printed and their authors and publishers were focussed on obtaining commercial goals. They differed a lot from didactic treatises with the form of communication: the content was often expressed through the technique of enumeration and accumulation of many sketches, appealing to the recipient’s imagination and emotions.
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This article discusses The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole as the first gothic work dramatizing, through the theme of “usurpation”, the emergence of the new but “greedy” bourgeoisie in England in the eighteenth century as a threat against the long-established, and from Walpole’s perspective, “divinely ordered” aristocratic system. Au fait with the worries and expectations of aristocracy, for he is the son of Robert Walpole (the first Prime Minister of England), and a member of nobility and the Parliament, Walpole, in his work, cannot help defending the established system against the emerging bourgeois paradigm. In the article, Walpole’s concern with the chaotic state of his country, which he reveals through building a devastating class conflict in Otranto, will be analyzed with the help of biographical, historical, and Marxist approaches. Finally, by referring to the Freudian theory of “wish-fulfillment through dreams”, Walpole’s solution for the conflict will be shown to be a self-gratifying one, satisfying the author’s aristocratic self.
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The article presents a multifaceted analysis of the underresearched complex relations of the works by Czesław Miłosz and the poetics and philosophical ‘legacy’ of haiku. Firstly, the author examines the haiku-like texts by Miłosz, focusing on sensual imagery employed by classical haijins and the Polish poet. The next section is devoted to re-interpretation of the metaliterary aspects of Miłosz’s texts concerning Far Eastern patterns of poetry. The final part deals with his translations of classical and contemporary haikus, confronting the work of Miłosz with the attempts of other translators and with original texts. The comparative analyses lead to a revision of the common opinions on Miłosz’s translations.
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This paper aims to show that, by attempting in his play Wielopole, Wielopole to reconstruct images of his family home and home town recorded in his memory, Tadeusz Kantor in fact poses an extraordinarily universal problem that is independent of culture and latitude: that of the impossibility of revisiting the past. By referring to the medium of memory and the medium of photography, Kantor perseveres in reconstructing images of the past, but at the same time expresses an awareness of the fact that a lost childhood cannot be repeated. The snapshots of memories, continually adjusted and corrected in the spectacle, acquire a physical dimension and become a space for the author’s endeavours that can be construed almost literally. The images retrieved from them create a presence of the author’s photographic vision.
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The article is the first Polish attempt to provide a theoretical framework for a relatively unknown term ‘allotopia’, coined by Umberto Eco in essay Il mondi della fantascienza. However, instead of following rather poststructuralist Eco’s reasoning, the text proceeds with the deconstruction of the underlain dichotomy between real (natural, ordinary, known, empirical, realistic) and unreal (unnatural, extraordinary, unknown, counterempirical, fantastic) world — which is subsequently exposed as fundamental for heretofore fantasy and SF studies. Consequently, the paper encourages postmodern reading of those ‘allotopian’ texts that resign from supporting a colonial, two-world model in favour of philosophy conscious worldbuilding.
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The aim of this paper is to present an Italian trend of the anthropology of literature represented by Fabio Dei (as well as other scholars, such as Pietro Clemente, Zelda Alice Franceschi, and Valerio Petrarca). Fabio Dei, an anthropologist of culture, analyses complex ties between anthropology and literature. First of all, he understands literature as a source of the study of culture. Also, he discusses the idea of anthropological writing (including the literary character of field research accounts). He refers his reflections on anthropology and literature in Italy to the development of Italian ethnography, folklore studies and philology.
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Ernst Wiechert was one of the most important representatives of German inner emigration. Nowadays he is almost entirely forgotten. The aim of this article is to show his literary output according to his own memoirs Jahre und Zeiten that shed different light on the interpretation of his work, but also on his attitude and own evaluation of work, often conditioned not only by political or social considerations, but also, to a large extent, by what happened in his personal life. This article is an attempt to provide, in general terms, an analytical sketch of the writer’s works, from his first novels written in times of Conservative Revolutionary movement — Der Totenwald; Der Wald — via growing detachment from national views and the subject of The First World War — Der Knecht Gottes Andreas Nyland; speeches from the years: 1933 Der Dichter und die Jugend and 1935 Der Dichter und seine Zeit — to his autobiographical account of the concentration camp Buchenwald — Der Totenwald, novel Das einfache Leben or Missa sine Nomine.
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The present article attempts at a critical discussion of taxonomical proposals of British scholar Farah Mendlesohn included in her study Rhetorics of Fantasy (2008). The study in question can be probably regarded as the most significant recent item in the academic discourse devoted to the theory (and taxonomy) of “fantastic” or non-mimetic literature, started more than 40 years ago by such notable researchers as, for example, Tzvetan Todorov or Eric Rabkin. From several reasons Mendlesohn’s study seems to occupy a special position in this discourse; the article analyzes both its indubitable achievements and possible shortcomings.
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Several decades into the digital age, it is clear we are living through a major turning point in the evolution of human civilization. Networked computers and mobile devices are changing the world — and us — in manifold ways, driving the emergence of a global society and culture. What that culture will look like and how it will function is, at this point, hard to predict, but one possible feature is a single world language spoken and understood by all. The current leading candidate for that role is, of course, English, the lingua franca of the early 21st century.
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