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Starting from the Old Polish proverb "Człowiek – Boże igrzysko" ("Man – A God’s Plaything") the paper discusses the previous etymological attempts to decipher the very meaning of the lexeme/sign human in Polish/Slavic, Greek, Latin and Hebrew, arguing that not only the signifié of the sign human deserves to be called "A God’s Plaything", but does it also its nominal signifiant.
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The text is devoted to the lexicographic reflection of human conceptualization in its various functions and roles. The aim of the article is to look at the term human as an element used to define words naming other elements of the world and to analyze the ways of codifying this conceptualization in the content of dictionary definitions, which are the result of the reflection of qualified lexicographers who can carefully observe the linguistic reality. The analyzes are based on definitions from dictionaries of contemporary Polish, in which the term human/people appear.
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The presented paper is an attempt to reflect on three ways characteristic to Western philosophy and culture of defining man in terms of image, sign and strength. Thinking about a man in terms of an image introduces a complex notion of fantasy. Thinking about man in terms of a sign introduces the no less complex notion of language as a code and a set of riddles. Finally, thinking of a man in terms of strength forces author to rethink the very category of desire. Finally, the author tries to reflect on the contemporary possibility of redirecting thinking about man beyond language (sign), image (imagination) and strength (desire).
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The article focuses on the semiotic analysis of arrays of iconic and verbal elements that create pages of John Amos Comenius’s "Orbis sensualium pictus" (1658). Bohemian pedagogue has composed each plate of the schoolbook as an analogon of the complete sign relation model. Comenius has shortened the distance between representations in the book and their referents: signs signify indexically, also inalienability of the referent as an object in the sign relation has been assumed and implied. Manifesting its encyclopaedic ambitions to encompass the whole of the pupil’s world, the book reveals itself as a complete semiotic system. Particularly modelled sign relations are in fact one of the strategies of generating the world presence effect within encyclopaedic space of the schoolbook.
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The article explores a difficult passage from "Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis" (ΧΙ, 5-6, Satur’s description of the staying of the executed martyrs in paradise). The bewilderment of publishers and translators is caused by the spectacle of the trees that lose their leaves in the Garden of Eden, instead of eternal blossom or bearing fruit, which was the topic of “heavenly text”. As a way out, they chose the marginal reading “the leaves were on fire” or the conjecture “the leaves were singing”. However we are not talking about the species of rosewood, but about the unprecedented huge not bush but tree of the rose, which continuously drops fragrant petals, never exposing the branches. In the practice of Romans, a shower with rose petals correlated with both – the solemn glorification of the triumphant and the mourning commemoration of the departed, called Rosalia, since the grave, crypt, monument were decorated with roses. In the Passio the grave meeting of the living, who remained on earth, and the souls of the dead martyrs, takes place in the Eden under the shade of a rose tree, which is mystically identical to visiting their graves decorated by rose bushes.
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Considering the category of the Byzantine canon Yuri Lotman remarks that, looking from the historic point of view, it is not the transition from one sign to another, but going deeply into the sign. The new text remains always the new-discovered old text. Byzantine art is generally sacral art, and it’s strictly connected with the experience of orthodox faith. The art finds its expression in the canon. The faith finds its expression in the dogma. Therefore the histories of Byzantine art and of Byzantine theology are related. Their turning-point is Iconoclasm, that concludes the period of formation of Christian dogma and of iconographic canon. After the last Council (787) and the Triumph of Orthodoxy (843) the dogma of faith and the dogma of art is generally configurated. It is the period of consolidation and contemplation the dogma and the canon, the period of “going deeply into the sign”.
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The paper pertains to treatening a linguistic sign as unconventional, i.e., invariant, with its content and expressive shape (form) rigidly attached to each other. A given content can be expressed in one way only, there is no synonymy, no polisemy, no translation. The phonetic aspect of the linguistic sign, its exceptional liturgical expression (prounanciation) in the Old Slavic language is examined, expression that is rooted – as by Boris Uspensky’s findings – in the XII Century. By the reference to texts been read during the Christmas Liturgy Service in the female monastyr in Wojnowo (Poland), in 1977, the most characteristic features of the prounanciation are scrutinized. The unconventional sign underlies the binary of culture, different aspect of life gain their semiotic importance.
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The article analyses the personal code of the Corpus Christi feast in Spycimierz (Poddębice county, Łódź voivodeship), distinguished by its tradition of a two-metre wide flower carpet created by the parishioners along the entire two-kilometre route of the procession. The author applies an innovative solution by using the findings of V. Propp concerning character functions in a fairy tale to interpret the ritual. The author identifies the following ritual roles: 1) the hero-protagonist (collective: the whole community of the parish, children scattering flower petals; individual: people skilled in creating flower patterns and managing works); 2) the villain (people who hamper flower picking and tourists destroying flower carpets); 3) the donor (institutional: parish priests, the mayor; individual: people giving flowers to parishioners); 4) the helper (families and tourists coming to Spycimierz to arrange flower carpets together with the parishioners); 5) the false hero (people from the parish who take credit for the feast but do not help prepare it). To sum up, the article presents the ritual process of transformation of the parishioners and their guests into ritual characters.
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On April 10, 2010 Smolensk catastrophe happened. A few days after the crash, scouts put a cross in front of the Presidential Palace as a symbol of remembrance for the victims of the crash. From that moment a rapid process of dichotomization of the Polish society started. In my analysis I focus on considering the process of symbolic encoding of the cross in the social discourse in the context of theories of social constructivism, sociology of knowledge, symbolic interactionism, sociolinguistics and communication theory.
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Like Copernicus, Darwin revolutionized the place of a man within creation: he thrown the man from the top position in the chain of beings and placed him among other living beings. Emergence of human as a species was not an unique act. Humans evolved within primates in a result of inherently non-directional evolutionary processes, and human is by no means one of this kind among animals. In a geological timescale, even the impact of humans on the Earth ecosystem may not prove profound. Thus, the proposed geological epoch “anthropocene” reflects human fondness for our own greatness.
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In the year 2020 biomedical scientists have been faced with an unprecedented challenge, but on the other hand the established process of science communication has been perturbed, as results which had not been peer reviewed have been published very rapidly and the press and politicians have become involved in their distribution and evaluation, and this has met with a rapid reaction from scientists.
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In the article, the author analyzes photos which are representing the victims of nuclear attacks and the so-called shadows of Hiroshima. She reflects on the role of the wounded body and scar in creating a story about an atomic catastrophe and the status of a victim created by selected survivors. She examines the status of photography after atomic attacks and the role it plays in creating an archive of this event.
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The text “Body of Grochowiak. Turpism or resurrection” is an analysis of Stanislaw Grochowiak’s poetic aesthetics, through the prism of how he describes the human body. The author questions the thesis, well-established in literary research, that Grochowiak was a turpist poet, focused on death, ugliness and pain. However, it shows how important the context in which the poet was creating is. Showing humanity through images devoid of Arcadian beauty is a fuller perspective, thanks to which poetry becomes more human, helps to disenchant the cruel reality by giving new meanings to suffering. It can not only become a companion of everyday life, but also help to find a language to tell about the post-war reality, often filled with pain and lack of hope.
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The article analyses the problem of recognition of sings and relevant understanding of their respective meanings, as well as the question of in what ways interpretative hypotheses determining the content of a literary work are conditional upon the reader’s cultural competencies and worldview assumptions. These considerations are related to my interpretation of Nabokov’s short story Signs and Symbols, which turns into a series of alternative readings. The ambiguity of the Nabokov text can be regarded as an expression of the author’s cognitive relativism. The proposed analysis leads to the conclusion that the story is about a cognitive drama of a human who endeavours to understand what is (or is not) a sign and what is happening in the reality surrounding him.
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The author reviews a number of old newspapers, dated between 1793 and 1918 (access to a wider selection was not possible due to the prevailing pandemic). He draws particular attention to news items and to small advertisements, which document the lives of ordinary people against a background of major historical events. Finally, he presents a short anthology of small ads placed on the Internet during the current pandemic.
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In contrast to the great Hollywood productions, ancient mythology entered Soviet screens in the form of animated cartoons for children. Ideological by nature, USSR culture adopted and changed for its needs also ancient myths and their heroes. This article analyses what changes took place and what meaning ancient heroes acquired in Soviet productions of the 1970s and 1980s. The subject of the analysis is the series of animations “Legends and Myths of Ancient Greece” (1969–1974) directed by Aleksandra Snezhko-Blotskaia and the film “Narodziny Heraklesa” (1982) directed by Yulian Kalisher.
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The paper refers to the film directed by Lech Majewski titled "The Garden of Earthly Delights". The author of this paper suggests an interpretation built on nihilism to be able to show that human is a kind of mistake of nothingness. We can think about art in a similar way that means that art is a kind of mistake of life in a biological sense. The word mistake can find positive meanings, but it depends of the experience of love, good or beauty. The film "The Garden of Earthly Delights" functions as the image full of intertextual connections is worth of cognition and understanding.
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The article focuses on the role of photography in the film “Another Day of Life” inspired by Ryszard Kapuściński’s prose of the same title. Photography was used to prepare artistic concepts and create the figure of main characters. Photography as an element of the film material was subject to activity similar to the collage method. As a semantic element, the act of photographing allowed to mark the moment of blurring the boundaries between text and image in the process of getting to know the world and blurring spatial relations. These ambiguous decisions were used by the authors to tell about Kapuściński’s birth as a writer.
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In this text the author reflects on the semiotic existence of culture discourses in connection with the rapid development of digital technology. The author analyzes selected texts of digital art as examples of the transformation in how works of literature, sculpture, or film exist. The article covers how movable font, which changes in shape and color, participates in shaping literary meanings; the creation of semiotic and interactive figures; the textualization of the user’s actions and body; dematerialization; processuality; narrativization; the temporalizing of sculpture which changes before the eyes of the recipient; the presence of alternative narratives in literature and film; multi-variant plots co-created by the recipient; and the artistic use of other discourses. The author proves that the structure and specificity of the digital sign lies at the base of the changes. The digital sign is immaterial, programmable, and hybrid, and combines aspects of expression, meaning, and action, which makes it efficient.
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