Polska poezja na Wyspach: podczas wieczorów panuje tu nostalgia

Author(s): Anna Kałuża / Language(s): Polish Issue: 3/2016

Kałuża describes the communicational conditions, politico-cultural perspectives and aesthetic or artistic approach to poems in the work of Polish poets residing outside Poland. As a point of departure she proposes to substitute twenty-first-century emigre narratives with notions of cultural encounters and everyday writing practices. Based on an analysis of both the poems and the traditions in which they are rooted, Kałuża proposes her principal thesis that these works are tied to a monolithic and conservative model of culture.

autoproletaryzacja w prozie Polaków migrujących do Niemiec, Irlandii i Wielkiej Brytanii

Author(s): Dirk Uffelman / Language(s): Polish Issue: 3/2016

This article investigates prose by Polish migrant writers by scrutinizing depictions of low-paid work, not only in the fictional texts but also in biographical sketches about the authors in blurbs and anthologies. Uffelmann adduces sociological studies on the ‘contradictory social mobility’ of Polish work migrants to show that devices of social self-degradation in migrant literature allude to the no-less-contradictory social situation faced by many migrant workers. His methodological approach is rooted in postcolonial theories, especially those that focus on paradoxical appropriations of identity. The main focus of the article is on ‘self-proletarianization’ and its function as an apotropaic twist: writers who ‘proletarianize’ either their protagonist(s) or themselves aim to achieve paradoxical recognition as artists.

Wojna wstydów

Author(s): Przemysław Czapliński / Language(s): Polish Issue: 4/2016

This article presents the changing role of shame in Polish literature from the late 1980s until today. Its development is marked by three phases: 1) in the first decade literature exposes violence towards minorities – the founding shame of a pluralistic society; 2) in the following decade literature and drama deconstruct the role of shame as neoliberalism takes hold; 3) in the third decade literature shows collective subjects shaped through independent definitions of shame and pride.

Wstyd czy duma? Niechciana ciąża i aborcja w peerelowskich i współczesnych powieściach dla dziewcząt

Author(s): Eliza Szybowicz / Language(s): Polish Issue: 4/2016

This article examines novels for girls that deal with unlawful pregnancy and abortion, comparing those that were published in the Polish People’s Republic with those that came out in the recent past. The study focuses on changing notions of shame and pride as tools of power and/or fuel for emancipation. Szybowicz is interested in the plots, characters, the language used by the characters, as well as rhetoric strategies in the novels, which she reads as manifestations of the dominant discourses of their times.

Dotkliwe historie

Author(s): Justyna Tabaszewska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 4/2016

Tabaszewska reads Svetlana Alexievich’s reportage works as affective texts that alter the conditions of how the world of Events is experienced and perceived. With a conceptual framework inspired by Lauren Berlant, Jill Bennett, Astrid Erll and others, Tabaszewska highlights those aspects of Alexievich’s works that indicate their affective, emotional, bodily and somatic character. These works of reportage are also read as an attempt to create a new form of remembering these previously marginalized Events that any given society must internalize and then work through.

Pisać w trzecim języku: przestrzeń między świętym a świeckim w myśli Gershoma Scholema i Jacquesa Derridy

Author(s): Karen C. Underhill / Language(s): Polish Issue: 5/2016

This article explores Gershom Scholem’s ‘On Our Language: A Confession’ (an open letter to Franz Rosenzweig on the secularisation of the Hebrew language) as well as Jacques Derrida’s essay on Scholem’s text. Underhill draws on the figure of the palimpsest and the cabbalistic concept of language in her attempt to reconstruct both texts. She also borrows Derrida’s notion of the ‘third language’ on the border between sacred and profane language.

Zawieyski może się bronić

Author(s): Barbara Tyszkiewicz / Language(s): Polish Issue: 5/2016

The writer Jerzy Zawieyski (1902-1969) represented Catholics at the heart of institutions of political power, and as such the Polish secret service had him under surveillance. The resulting documentation, covering over a decade of his life, offers rich material on the culture, society and politics in the Polish People’s Republic. Joanna Siedlecka book Biografie odtajnione [Declassified Biographies] draws on Zawieyski’s files at the archives of the Communist security apparatus. But her sensationalist portrait, which imbues the files with the status of ‘dark knowledge’ on ‘how it really was back then,’ makes light of the demands of an academic approach towards historical sources. Her narrative is dominated by a focus on homosexuality; the profusion of scandalous details, half-truths and conjectures obscures the emotional troubles that influenced Zawieyski’s work. Tyszkiewiecz’s article points out the weaknesses of such an approach to literary non-fiction and proposes an alternative take on the same material.

Wspólnoty pamięci lokalnej i narodowej. Kilka uwag o ich zbiorowym wytwarzaniu a la polonaise

Author(s): Joanna Kurczewska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 6/2016

Kurczewska explores how communities of local and national memory are formed. Working on the assumption that they are emotional communities, she diagnoses them from a socio-institutional perspective, drawing on numerous empirical studies on local communities and their basic collective agents, such as associations, clubs and other initiatives. She proposes that the years 1989-2015 (i.e. the Third Republic) saw the formation of communities of memory, which functioned on the meso level of Polish society. They shaped the content and forms of collective memory, becoming an essential social and cultural resource for Polish memory. Kurczewska points out that these communities are a necessary element to diagnose the national memory of Polish society as a complex structural entity. Last but not least, they are a factor in a ‘grassroots’ social and cultural interpretation on the level of the macrosociety of the state.

(Nie)pamięć zbiorowa Polaków jako skuteczna regulacja emocji

Author(s): Michał Bilewicz / Language(s): Polish Issue: 6/2016

Bilewicz applies notions borrowed from the psychology of emotions to understand collective (im)memory in Poland, with a particular focus on defensive reactions to new historical data on Poles’ negative behaviour. Based on James Gross’ concept of emotion regulation, Bilewicz elaborates a model of downregulating collective moral emotions (such as guilt and shame). He then applies this model to the debate on the Jedwabne pogrom. He also outlines systematic social psychological studies that support his proposed emotion downregulation model. The article concludes with a discussion of alternative ways of presenting negative history – ways that overcome those defensive emotion regulatory processes.

Polak Mały i fantazja impotencji

Author(s): Adam Lipszyc / Language(s): Polish Issue: 6/2016

Lipszyc analyses Polish collective memory from a psychoanalytical perspective. Building on the work of Melanie Klein and its application to international relations as proposed by Hanna Segal, he tries to show that the Polish collective subject and the memory that defines it exist in a particular form of the paranoid-schizoid position. The defining characteristic of this position is a fantasy of one’s own impotence, which allows the subject to disregard his or her own agency and to eschew responsibility for his or her own actions. Lipszyc enhances his analysis by drawing on Walter Benjamin’s notions on myth and the demonic.

Osobliwe zrządzenie Opatrzności Bożej… Polska pamięć Zagłady w perspektywie katolicko-narodowej

Author(s): Jacek Leociak / Language(s): Polish Issue: 6/2016

The Jewish Holocaust has a special place in Polish discourses on memory. It would be hard to overestimate its importance in constructing a model of Polish identity. But Leociak points out a weakness in Polish Holocaust memory – one that appears especially in narratives about saving Jews. The rhetoric, poetics and metaphors of these discourses – both private and public – are astonishingly durable, given the changing political context. This article is a preliminary exploration of a certain type of Polish discourse on Holocaust memory, one that has a long tradition but is now gaining prominence. It could be described as a Catholic-national discourse, where both elements have equal weight, affirming its rootedness in the ideology of the prewar Catholic National Democracy formation (also known as ND or ‘Endecja’).

„Im się zdaje, że zapomnimy. O nie!” Rodowody rewolucji

Author(s): Marcin Zaremba / Language(s): Polish Issue: 6/2016

Zaremba demonstrates how insurrections and revolts were commemorated in the 1970s, how those traditions were reproduced, and who remembered them. The article begins with a description of the events of December 1970, which would become important reference points for ideas on oppositional activism. Discussing the Poles’ collective memory of March 1968 and October 1956, Zaremba emphasizes the significance of World War II: a code of resistance and cooperation has emerged as a long-term consequence, resounding most clearly and most frequently in the myth of the Warsaw Uprising. The article concludes with a discussion of what Adam Mickiewicz called książki zbójeckie (robbers’ books) – a term Zaremba applies to writers such as Bohdan Cywiński, Andrzej Kijowski and Marian Brandys. They were robbers’ books because they altered the atmosphere of public life in the 1970s, reclaiming memories of political thought that had no official place in the Polish People’s Republic.

Doświadczenie bez nazwy. „Oświęcim” ≠ Auschwitz

Author(s): Agnieszka Dauksza / Language(s): Polish Issue: 6/2016

Dauksza examines the status of non-Jewish Polish concentration camp survivors. Their wartime experience and the way in which they functioned after the war has always been and continues to be different from the Jewish experience. Based on empirical studies, Dauksza argues that the problem is that their experience is ‘an experience without a name’: unable to name it, they are also unable to experience what happened to a significant group of Poles during the occupation. The question concerns not only actual former prisoners and their relatives – as the framework of post-memory transfer would suggest – but also individuals who for several years lived in fear of being deported, as well as those who witnessed the deportation of others, including Jews.

Publiczne konstruowanie historii. Przeszłość w prawicowej ikonografii

Author(s): Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 6/2016

Saryusz-Wolska analyses covers of conservative weekly magazines to examine contemporary Polish right-wing iconography. Focusing on historical motifs, she highlights the mechanisms behind the construction of ‘us’ and ‘them’ or ‘enemies’ and ‘friends’ in visual discourses. Drawing on voices from both politics and the media, these right-wingers call attention to perceived threats – such as Europe, Germany, Russia, or refugees. The magazine covers studied here mirror those ‘threats’ by drawing on a simplistic and emotional symbolism. The European Union is likened to Nazism, Angela Merkel to Hitler. We also see collages that draw on historical iconography but in a contemporary context, such as refugees forcing Poland’s borders in the place of Wehrmacht soldiers. Thus the iconography of the right creates simplistic parallels and suggests false analogies.

Żydzi i zagłada w polskich kulturach pamięci: między antagonizmem i agonem

Author(s): Sławomir Kapralski / Language(s): Polish Issue: 6/2016

25 years ago, Polish gentiles were interviewed on the disappearance of their Jewish neighbours. Kapralski re-examines those interviews in order to revise current attitudes to this kind of memory. He presents memory as a product of current constellations of the remembering subject’s interests, whereby the subject is embroiled in existential efforts to construct mnemonic safety, which in turn is the basis for processes of reconstructing collective memory. These processes were particularly vital in the context of the uncertainty that marked the transformation in the 1990s – a transformation that Kapralski frames in terms of a structural trauma that shapes memories about historical trauma. Such a framing of memories of the Jews means that they have been publicly commemorated in Poland, but they are not remembered within the structures of communicative memory.

Русские в Трёхречье: исторический экскурс

Author(s): Andrey Zabiyako / Language(s): Russian Issue: 2/2016

The article deals with history of formation of the Russian enclave near Trekhrech’ye (Sanhe, the District of Hulunbuir, Inner Mongolia, the People's Republic of China). Since the beginning of the 19th century, this area bordering on Transbaikalia became populated from the Russian side by Cossacks, Old Believers, crime fugitives, to mine gold men. From the middle of the 19th century, cause of hunger in the southern and central regions the Chinese settled there. There are more marriages registered between Chinese men and Russian women so the metis people were born ("half-bloods"). The events of the October revolution and the Russian Civil war strengthened an influx of the Russian emigrants to Trekhrech’ye. To the middle of the 1950th the Russian and "half-bloods" constituted the majority of the population Trekhrech’ya which living in traditions of the Russian country culture and speaking Russian.

Recenzja: W. Lipiński (red.), Lipowanie. Kultura religijna naddunajskich staroobrzędowców, Warszawa 2015, 384 s. + il.

Author(s): Michał Głuszkowski / Language(s): Polish Issue: 2/2016

Review of a collective work written as a result of field research conducted by a group of young researchers from University of Warsaw under Wojciech Lipiński’s supervision. The texts are devoted to various aspects of life of an ethno-confessional minority, the Lipovans in Ukraine.

Магда Люнчева-Милчева. По пътя на Слънцето и Месеца. Традиционни календарни празници на християните и мюсюлманите в Хасковския край. Стара Загора, 2016

Author(s): Rachko Popov / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 1/2017

Nowa Humanistyka: w poszukiwaniu granic

Author(s): Agata Bielik-Robson / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2017

Bielik-Robson proposes a critical analysis of the New Humanities. Despite the seeming continuity of emancipatory approaches, she argues, the New Humanities are not founded on enlightenment philosophy but on Heidegger and his unconditional critique of modern subjectivity and its Machenschaft, i.e. its calculating attitude to the world, to which it does not feel connected. The lack of connection also signifies a lack of ties: the unbridled subject of calculating rationality turns out to be the source of unlimited violence towards being. The New Humanities oppose the hubris of such a notion of subjective freedom by trying to identify its limits: to link it with existence once again, and in this way to tie it up, to entrap and tether it. The goal is to experience the ‘blessing of limits’: not to make a progressive or transgressive move towards the exit, but to make a regressive move, somewhat like the prodigal son – a manoeuvre that the tragic Greeks described as nostos or ‘return home’.

EXIST DB OR SAXON/C IN PHP. A COMPARISON BETWEEN TWO APPROACHES FOR XSLT 2.0 BASED WEBSITES

Author(s): Christian Schwaderer / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2017

XML and XSLT are very popular technologies among Digital Humanists. However, when it comes to deploying an XSLT 2.0 processor into a website infrastructure some difficulties arrise. This paper discusses two possible approaches for doing XSLT 2.0 transformations on the fly on a Web (Application) Server: Saxon as a PHP extension and Saxon within the popular XML database eXist. The conclusion shows, that both solutions have their pros and cons. In the end, however, the PHP solution wins.