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This article sets out to succinctly propose a different approach to the way Bruges-la-Morte can be read. Starting with a few words describing the author’s childhood and young adulthood, we underline some of the most important aspects that have shaped Rodenbach’s literary taste. Traditionally considered a tragic story, our proposition for the way this text can be read is that of a text written ironically. This idea comes from the fact that the decadent movement starts out as a response to romanticism and by turning against it and negating its core values, ends up turning the decadent texts into a sort of parody (which is in itself a modern aspect).
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Two cultures hold the reigns in Andrei Makine’s novels – the Russian matrix and the French catalyst. His characters represent Slavic souls which adopt the French mentality. However, L’Archipel d’une autre vie encompasses the almost imperceptible difference between ideologies considering the manner in which those two people refer themselves to the notion of “fate” and, implicitly, to that of “irony of fate”; it is the Russian phrasing of this concept that unravels the mythical aspect in this universe. In Makine’s writings, this “irony of fate” brings wisdom. Pavel Gartsev rejects the life he had planned upon, a life with fears and beliefs, all the while the woman whom could’ve run away plenty of times proofs her never-ending loyalty and waits 10 days for the man she loves. In the end, these two humans don’t exist anymore. Far away from the world, in the archipelago of Shantar Islands, the animus manages to meet again his anima.
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While the notion of irony is well suited to certain literary genres, often referred to as minors, it seems less obvious in philosophical discourse and especially when it comes to dealing with such important subjects as theology or the central issues of religion as the immortality of the soul, miracles or the greatness of God. However, in the 17th century, when the Inquisition and the imprimatur were still powerful institutions, surprisingly, there were many examples of the use of irony, particularly in speeches dealing with religious issues. More than political issues, however, it is probably the most monitored theme and should be used to increase respect. How is it that philosophers dare to use irony to deal with these subjects? How do they use irony? And above all, why do philosophers use irony to address certain themes? It is to these questions that I will propose to answer with an approach combining philosophy and rhetorical analysis of the texts. To do this, I will have to place the humorous excerpts in the dynamics of the works and in the historical context.
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The concept of radical walking is the beginning of a description of various types of resistance, which is a form of pressure from minority groups such as women, mothers, people with disabilities, LGBTQ+ and others. On the examples of activities in public space, the author examines which myths and tabs have been crossed and in what form. Radical Walking is therefore an attempt to politicize this seemingly transparent form of everyday practice.
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The author is concerned with a scandal deliberately created in the work of art (especially in literature). He distinguishes it from a scandal understood as an appraisal of someone’s act or behaviour. He considers intentional scandal in its function of protest, uniting a triple kind of provocation: social, artistic and political. Founding examples for such a kind of activity can be noticed among various groups of European avant-garde in the first decades of the 20th century. Analysing separately each of the three elements, the author states that the driving force of a deliberate scandal is a revelation of something that should have stayed concealed. He emphasizes that the norms and prohibitions broken by a scandal are always of common and historical nature.
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The growing popularity of protests that make strategic use of dance suggests the necessity for the sociological analysis to develop tools that could capture the specificity of this form of contestation. With this aim in mind, it is worth turning to the field of dance studies, somehow neglected in the Polish academic sphere, since it provides interesting perspectives for the scientific exploration of protest events. The following article offers an overview of the key proposals of dance theorists that can be applied to the analysis of contestation episodes. These theoretical considerations are complemented by a case study of rave protests in Georgia (2018), which implements selected research perspectives proposed by dance scholars. Thus, this paper displays the usefulness of the choreographic analysis of contestation practices for the sociology of social movements. Moreover, it highlights the potential of dance as a valuable form of communicating political resistance.
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Poetry slams are events bordering on poetry, theatre and performance. Organized around the world for over 40 years, they have become a method for the presentation of independent oral creativity. Their important feature is to trigger active involvement of recipients who become judges of slam poetry. Oral poetry created by slammers is usually colloquial. As a result, it is sometimes omitted in academic discussion and treated as devoid of aesthetic or, more broadly, literary values. The grassroots, and due to its oral character, ephemeral work of slammers often has a one-off dimension, so unarchived texts, testimonies of rebellion, disappear forever. The aim of the article is to present slammer statements as a new genre and to discuss the most important features indicating the issues of opposition contained in them, which constitute their thematic core.
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In the interpretations of the biographies of bohemian writers as well as bohemian literary characters the act of rebellion is treated as the main trait of the artistic bohemianism. This rebellion seems to be a harmless joke, whereas the bohemian is presented as a jester, overcoming adversities. However, in the studies on bohemianism little attention is paid to the fact that protest of Parisian bohemians, outwardly aimed at bourgeoisie, is marked by a longing for a bourgeois and stable life. The leading French bohemians from the 1840s would most likely abandon that life, which was proved by the biographies of Baudelaire and Murger, the author of the "Scenes of Bohemian Life", as well as peripeteia of the novel’s characters. Likewise, biographies and works of Polish bohemian writers from the turn of 1830s and 1840s are devoid of rebellion. Their attitude is rather pessimistic. They are resigned and aware of their own failure.
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The aim of this article is to analyze Theatre 21’s "Revolution That Never Was" directed by Justyna Sobczyk. The author demonstrates how – in a non-obvious way – the performance raises the subject of the protest of people with disabilities and their caretakers, which took place in 2018 and lasted for forty days. She also explains how the actors and actresses challenge the social stereotypes of disabled people. The key contexts for this article are disability rights activism discussed by Tom Shakespeare and the problem of regaining presence in the public sphere (both political and artistic). The latter is related to the title of the essential publication concerning disability in theatre and performance, edited by Ewelina Godlewska-Byliniak and Justyna Lipko-Konieczna.
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The language of social protests often evokes ambivalent feelings. On the one hand, it carries emancipatory power, on the other, it outrages because of breaking conventions. In this chapter I focus on one of linguistic tools used in such protests, namely vulgarisms. I try to investigate their subversive potential and reveal why they might be an attractive means of expression. The aim of this chapter is to reflect on the role that vulgarisms play in constructing the language of protest used by the Disability Rights Movement in the UK, on the example of activity and poems by Alan Holdsworth. I argue that vulgarisms are an excellent tool to overturn the norm. I distinguish three ways of using them: shock, provocation and subversion. My research material consists mainly of poems and lyrics by the mentioned author. Additionally, slogans on the placards on the demonstrations organized by him and press articles reporting those events are also taken into consideration. The history of the development of the Disability Rights Movement is the context of my investigation. Considerations are situated in the paradigm of disability studies.
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The article presents two literary representations of the Black Protest seen as a broader political and cultural emancipation movement. Barbara Klicka’s work "Sztandar, sztandar" problematizes the issue of a protest from the perspective of language – the subject of the poem, who, in the face of political events, decides to temporarily change her style. On the other hand, "Aborcja z miłości" by Dominika Dymińska focuses rather on the issue of affects as well as reproductive and emotional work, which is oppressively imposed on women in a patriarchal society. The nature of the Black Protest leads to the conclusion that all perspectives, if they are only based on the same axiological foundations, are equally valid and important, but each of them emphasizes a different aspect of emancipation.
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The article presents, through the analysis of two volumes of poetry ("Apocalypse of the Dog" by Adam Leszkiewicz and Songs by Damian Kowal), the specificity of the protest, which, in the author’s opinion, is an obligatory modality of the lyrical persona in contemporary Polish poetry. In the first case, the rebellious fierceness of the subject is expressed when it realizes that it is influenced by dehumanizing ideology and unspecified power as a force that deprives it of the right to live in a community of equal beings. The persona constructed by Leszkiewicz is sensitive to practices that authoritatively suspend the freedom to construct a private image of the world and, in line with her predisposition, seeks ways to emancipate consciousness. "Apocalypse of the Dog" turns out to be an account of the subject taking his private convictions in brackets and becoming a sovereign protester in a world previously turned to rubble. In Kowal’s "Songs", however, the actions of lyrical personas are inspired by the specificity of ambient music. Their statements are penetrated by the background of everyday life, which influences their emotions and completely absorbs thoughts, acting oppressively on them. In "Songs", the subject, in order to maintain his presence, must make offensive protest gestures, therefore his existence always betrays the contesting position, regardless of whether it is intentional (declaratively confirmed) or unconscious. Here, the poetic contestation is the result of the self-knowledge of a man realizing the scale of pressure exerted on him.
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The article focuses on rarely noticed aspects of the phenomenon of resistance against circumstances perceived as oppressive or, for various reasons, difficult to be accepted. First, it will be the lack of resistance; second, resistance against a creative cognition of the New/Other, against opening oneself to them as something enriching. Radek Rak’s Baśń o wężowym sercu… will serve as an equivocal literary example.
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This article attempts to capture the contestative dimension of Bruno Jasieński’s prose works. More precisely, the author is interested in the role of political imagination, which is revealed not only in the space of the presented world, but also results directly from the writer’s own creative attitude. The novel „I Burn Paris” is read as one of the versions of avant-garde prose and as a text that in a non-obvious way draws attention to the limited possibilities of the language of literature and the ways of influencing, by unmaskingly creating alternative, utopian visions of reality.
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Georges Perec admitted in an interview that his work may be summarized with this moral: “there is a conflict between people and institutions and the role of the latter is always harmful”. The aim of the article is to analyze, using the examples of Rzeczy ["Things: A Story of the Sixties"] and "Człowiek, który śpi" ["A Man Asleep"], how through in-depth observation and a detailed description of everyday life, Perec resisted the domination of the ubiquitous media discourse and bureaucracy. In conclusion, we will briefly mention the book "Pamiętam, że" ["I Remember"], Perec’s gesture towards his generation, aiming at creating the common space of understanding.
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The text is a polemic with the stereotypical image of Stefan Żółkiewski as an apparatchik. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the structure of the academic field, the author analyzes Żółkiewski’s theoretical attitude, according to texts and extra-texts from the 1930s and 1940s. The materials from the period of the Nazi occupation in Poland are pivotal, but the remaining sources are used contextually.
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The paper tackles a problem somehow omitted in linguistics and philosophy of language: silence as a performative speech act. It is the agency that differs silence from other linguistic and non-linguistic behaviour, like quiet, understatement, underspecification, presupposition or implicature. The discursive character of silence is due to the authorial intention, the address, the felicity conditions and the assumed answer. Among the issues discussed are the dialectic bond between silence and speech and the negatively connoted linguistic representations of silence, enrooted in the Polish language and Polish political culture. The main protagonist of the study will be Tadeusz Kotarbiński, the side characters - other philosophers and poets who believed silence was action.
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The author explores the issue of protest as an element of the traditionally understood path of intellectual development. The opposition against pragmatism and critical thinking should be – as famous researchers of the idea of a university believe (Jaspers, Newman) – the primary responsibility of the scientist. The author of the article claims that under the influence of contemporary process of consumption of science, we should be asking ourselves: „Why are we not protesting?”.
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"The Poetics of Protest" is the result of the discussion held during the conference organized by the Scientific Circle of Theory of Literature and the Department of Poetics, Literary Theory and Methodology of Literary Research. The session was conducted online at the Faculty of Polish Studies of Warsaw University between 6th and 14th March 2021. The texts presented in the book are concerned with the issue of protest, revolt and opposition, which is analysed using modern humanistic concepts, drawn from disability studies, sociology of literature or dance studies.
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