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In the article I wonder about the reasons for the growing popularity of the postapocalypticworks in the pop culture of the early 21st century. The world after the collapseof the Western civilization is created in various literary, film and photographic forms, theexamples of which I present in my study. The alternative post-apocalyptic reality is the postindustrialreality, archaized and non-anthropocentric. The technological regress presented inthe works is based on imaginings of the end and is analogous to the fall of humanity amongthose people who survived after the “end” or were born afterwards. In the post-apocalypticworks of the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries it can be noticed that the authors of the visionof world “after to end” abandoned an extremely negative tone.
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The article discusses the issue of development of views on an atomic bomb and a nuclearwar created by scientists, politicians, military commanders, as well as civilian strategists,starting from the vision of an atomic bomb as a herald of the New Deal, social and political,till the American military plans of a nuclear attack on hundreds of targets in the Soviet Union. The aim of the study is to demonstrate that the nuclear revolution which involvednot only to military matters, but also strategy, international policy or war ethics was primarilylinked to, apart from new technology, the idea of the future nuclear war and how its range,course and consequences were imagined.
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The article presents an analysis of humorous genres of contemporary Polish, Russianand Czech folklore (jokes, sadistic poems, chastushka), inspired by real or anticipated tragicevents related to the use of nuclear energy. The purpose of comparing the texts in threelanguages was to identify common or different motivations which contributed to writing thetexts of atomic humour in the countries with various degrees of advancement of nuclearweapons. The analysis is based on the texts of jokes (approx. 200) found in the Internet(the Polish, Russian and Czech servers), materials spread through spoken communication,and non-serial publications. The analysis proved that the fear motivating the atomic jokes isnot caused by the fear of the atomic technology itself, but by the fear of irresponsible peopleand irreversibility of their unreasonable actions.
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The aim of the article is to analyse a short story by Franz Kafka In the Penal Colony(In der Strafkolonie). At the beginning, the circumstances surrounding the creation of thenovel were described. After that the images of the colonizers (Officer, Explorer) andthe colonized (Condemned, Soldier) were presented. Thereafter, the process of justice andmechanism of execution – the use of an elaborate torture device that carves the sentenceof the prisoner on his skin – were interpreted. In the last part of the article the attitude ofKafka towards process of decolonization was described.
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The article focuses on the assumption that it is worth getting interested in sociologicalconcepts in the spirit of sociology of sociology. It happens that biographies of sociologicalconcepts themselves are interesting. Above all, however, they tell a lot on the more generalmechanisms, which construct the field of sociology-science.The basic part of the article focuses on unlucky concepts: (1) concepts which divergedfrom their original theoretical context, (2) concepts which started functioning as summariesof theories (at a loss for the concepts and summarized theories) and (3) concepts which havebeen promising as tools for analysis and description of the social world, but have neverbeen included in the dictionary of key sociological terms as they were “killed” by endlessdiscussions on their status and usefulness.The attempt to examine the history of (selected) unlucky concepts has two goals: first,recognizing mechanisms pushing sociology-science out of the field; second, identificationof some development barriers of contemporary sociology.
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The article analyses Max Weber’s position regarding the so-called Polish question fromthe point of view of post-colonial theory. The author discusses the circumstances of Weber’sscientific interest in the Polish question and offers an interpretation of his statements in thisregard. Then, she moves on to explore the relationship between this early inspiration and thesubsequent development of Weber’s comparative historical sociology, whereupon followsan outline of its post-colonial criticism. The article concludes with a suggestion of applyingthe author’s approach to studying the post-communist transformation and transitologicaldebates in Poland.
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The aim of the article is to trace the concept of the “iron cage of capitalism” attributedto one of fathers-founders of sociology, Max Weber. The author presents the origin of theconcept – a controversial decision of Talcott Parsons, a famous sociologist and the firsttranslator of Weber’s work The Ethics of Protestantism and the Spirit of Capitalism intoEnglish. Moreover, the presence of the “iron cage” in selected translations and originalworks in Polish and English is discussed.
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The concept of capital is one of the most noticeable and at the same time the mostunclear concepts organizing not only the field of social sciences, but also the public debatein Poland and in the world. The article analyses two ways of conceptualization of the capitalrooted in political and neoclassical economy together with their sociological modifications.The aim of this short reconstruction is to present a complex relation between the economiccapital and the social capital treated as moral capital. This ambiguity induces us to aska question about the significance of shifting this concept from the field of economic analysesto the centre of sociological theories in the context of crisis and transformations of latecapitalism.
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The article discusses the significance of the concept of ideology for social sciences.Although this concept was abandoned a long time ago in favour of the more “neutral” terms,due to Marxism and psychoanalysis it returned to social sciences in the second half of the20th century. In the article, I present the concept of Louis Althusser, whose perception ofideological phenomena shifts them from the field of studies on cognitive mistakes andmanipulation towards the socialization theory. I discuss shortly the psychoanalytical sourcesof this concept and point to the sociological tradition where similar concepts and problemscan be found. I use the empirical example to illustrate the consequences of Althusser’s theoryfor understanding ideology, and Slavoj Zizek’s theory to show the ways out of certain impasseof this theory. In the summary, the question returns on the importance of the concept ofideology for social sciences.
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In this article, I use Mieke Bal’ concept of wandering notions to analyse the conceptualapparatus that Zygmunt Bauman used in his works. In the first part of the text, I describe themost important features of his works which have connection with the practice of borrowingfor the needs of the sociological discourse of the terms coming from other contexts:transdisciplinarity, connections with literature and art, engaged character. Then, I present theexamples of the concepts of illustrative, propagation and foundation character which appearin his analyses. In the conclusion, I highlight the significance of categories redefined by himfor social sciences and humanities development.
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The paper undertakes the problem of a social circle notion “wandering”. The mainobjective is the description of this process and the extraction of its key fields. My mainargument is that as many of terms are borrowed from everyday language, its vaguenessmakes a social circle a notion differently interpreted in structural and interactionist perspectives,which constitute two main ways of its transfer. The analysis presents three transfers:from everyday life to cultural sciences theoretical framework; from low-operationalisednotion to an acute one from perspective of different sociological paradigms; from a metaphorof collectivity to an element of network theory.
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The cause to write an article was a question how to examine emotions which are ofspatial nature. While the colloquial language copes with “spatiality” of feelings – it knowsemotions and calls them (mood, atmosphere, climate, colour) – sociology has not developeda category enabling a systematic analysis of this phenomenon so far. In the theory of arts, thesituation is different. The leading subject of the text is reflection on possibility of combiningthe theory of art and sociology of emotions. The proposed link is to be the concept of imagetreated as “sensitizing concept” (Herbert Blumer). In the article, I refer to the concepts havingtheir roots in philosophy, social psychology and sociology of emotions which touch uponthe issue of spatiality of emotions and compare them to the concepts related to the theoryof image.
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This paper focuses on the symbolic role attributed to Cyprian Norwid (1821–1883) inthe young poets’ and critics’ circle gathered around the right-wing conspiracy journal Artand Nation (1942–1944) in occupied Warsaw. They used a paraphrase of Norwid’s words,“The artist is the organizer of national imagination”, in order to emphasize their aim of anautonomous and at the same time nationally committed art. However, in many statementsby Andrzej Trzebiński (1922–1943) and Wacław Bojarski (1921–1943), the term “nation”appears to be more of a performative gesture than a reference to a consistent, historicallyevolving reality, as conceived of by Norwid. It was only in the 1944 essay “History and Deed”, never to be printed in the underground, that the circle’s foremost poet Tadeusz Gajcy (1922–1944) critically revisited anti-traditional activism and championed a genuinely “Norwidian”, contemplation-based understanding of creativity.
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The author argues that a role of Zenon Przesmycki in the process of bringing backCyprian Norwid to the Polish literary life is slightly overestimated. At the turn of the 19th andthe 20th centuries on the Polish lands, the reception of French symbolism took place, whichdetermined the perception of the author of Vade-mecum working in Paris (since 1849) asa great precursor of intellectual “visual poetry”. However, by making Norwid a strictlyRomantic poet, the generation of the Young Poland artists effectively distanced themselvesfrom artistic borrowings associated with Baudelaire, Verlaine, etc., thus obtaining the effectof the “nativeness” of modern Polish poetry at that time.
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The study is devoted to personological analysis of the one-hundred-poem collectionentitled Vade-mecum by Cyprian Norwid in the light of advanced and, above all, multidimensionalresearch on the personology of the subject of creative activities of EmilyDickinson’s poems. Based to a large extent on Robert Weisbuch’s complex terminology fromthe canonical volume Emily Dickinson’s Poetry, using his typology of lyrical personas, theresearcher on Norwid gains important, additional comparative literature tool allowing, e.g.the juxtaposition alongside each other of the types of poetry written by Norwid, Dickinsonand Baudelaire (Norwid’s and Dickinson’s lyrical persona is – it seems – a mixture ofa “wounded dialectician” and “engaging sufferer”, Baudelaire’s persona is, in turn, themarriage of features of an “engaging sufferer” and “withdrawn bard”). This is how the premodernist“theatre of personas” is created, the stronger that – which I am trying to emphasizein this text – despite appearances, it is possible to find similarities in the poetic languagebetween the works of Norwid and Dickinson. In the same way, Norwid and Dickinson – inorder to build their lyric – use a poetic function in the Jakobsonian sense: on the one hand,they strengthen and intensify its impact, on the other hand, they use it to “cover up” thephenomenon of linguistic disintegration of the world for which Modernist lyric poetryserved in a special way as a detector, a kind of litmus paper.
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The author proposes a reflection on discovering the poet with regard to his creationor construction. This issue is discussed on the example of Emily Dickinson’s works whichwere published only after her death and were not prepared for print by the author herself.In the light of the latest research on the material dimension of her legacy (starting fromVirginia Jackson’s study Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading from 2005 to therecently published collection The Gorgeous Nothings. Emily Dickinson’s Envelope Poems),it appears that many of Dickinson’s works were not written in a form that could be recognizedas poetic at first glance. A large part was preserved only in notebooks, loose sheets coveredwith handwriting written in continuo or at odd angles, in a manner adapted to the format ofa given scrap of paper, usually a free fragment of a recycled envelope or a torn-off cornerof a piece of paper used previously for a different purpose. These texts had to be recognizedthen by discoverers as poems, and then copied and edited in a way consistent with whatwas considered lyric poetry in the era. Some of them were then rejected as not falling intothe category of poetry and included in the opus of the American only by later researchers.Others, in the first editions treated as poems with time were excluded by historians ofliterature from this collection. Contrary to the provocative title, the aim of the article isnot to answer the question about the status of the texts left by Dickinson. Instead, the authorreflects on the poetic criteria ascribed to her works by the first and subsequent readers.
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