![Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree Europäischer Master für Lexikographie/ European Master in Lexicography (EMLex) Sprawozdanie za rok 2017/2018](/api/image/getissuecoverimage?id=picture_2019_49355.jpg)
We kindly inform you that, as long as the subject affiliation of our 300.000+ articles is in progress, you might get unsufficient or no results on your third level or second level search. In this case, please broaden your search criteria.
Węgrzyn proposes a new reading of Henryk Rzewuski’s Pamiątek Soplicy [The Memoirs of Soplica, 1839] as a recording of a melancholy becoming-aware of the decline of traditional noble culture in the nineteenth century. While Rzewuski’s contemporaries read his gawęda as a ritualised commemoration and attempt to reintegrate the community, his work lost its readability for later generations and became no more than a “picturesque” tale about a Sarmatian past. Questions of the performativity of the gawęda, its genre relationships and its oral roots all have a common denominator – melancholy. This allows Węgrzyn to shed light on the paradoxes linked with the character of Rzewuski-Soplica and to capture the ambivalent status of the Romantic gawęda which tries to recreate the identity of the oral noble gawęda in writing.
More...
Kuziak examines Mickiewicz’s lectures at the Collège de France and the intermingling of scholarship (the emerging humanities) and politics, arguing that they were subject to a variety of changing and sometimes contradictory economical meanings. As a work/event they come close to what Deleuze and Guattari call minor literature.
More...
Leopold Buczkowski’s experimental novel Uroda na czasie [Timely Beauty] is a loose literary composition based on various genres, “alien words” from different epochs and sources. Bukowiecka examines the ways in which Buczkowski transforms them, cutting them off from the context and situation in which they were uttered, disassembling and disintegrating them. The writer superimposes elements belonging to forms that have no apparent connection, or he merges them into abstract arrangements of utterances, following new laws that depart from the rules of pragmatics in speech. The procedures of Buczkowski’s transformations, Bukowiecka argues, are signs of his expression and the work’s ironic modality. They represent a veiled declaration of the impossibility of describing the world in an original way – an impossibility related to the writer’s personal experiences. Drawing on the work of Grzegorz Grochowski, Bukowiecka examines the instrumentation of genres in Uroda, i.e., the ways in which Buczkowski updates, problematises and analyses the meanings inscribed in the “memory” of the genres he uses.
More...
The magnetic tape recordings archived at the Museum of Literature in Warsaw, especially the recordings of Miron Białoszewski’s voice, present an entire spectrum of the everyday oral genres that constitute Białoszewski’s artistic and social performance. The ontological status of his literary texts and his work’s cultural and social function are problematised by the fact that these practices play an essential role in the creative process and are related to situational spoken genres, which in turn are embedded in the everyday. Karpowicz also discusses in how far Białoszewski’s everyday practices are artistic and what we can say about their genre.
More...
Samborska-Kukuć compares locomotive polylogues in two novels set in the Polish People’s Republic – Antoni Libera’s Madame and Ryszard Ćwirlej’s Ręczna robota [Hand- Made]. Both writers portray social realities, such as general discontentment with the oppressive and repressive socialist state. The two novels are structurally analogous and share the same political message, representing the voice of the people in the postwar period of Soviet hegemony and its ideological derivatives (the Polish United Workers’ Party, the Citizens’ Militia and their Motorised Reserves, etc.). The means of transmission are polyphonic but complementary and homologous statements by travellers provoked by the artefact described. Despite the humour typical of popular forms, they can be read in terms of Józef Tischner’s personalist philosophy of the dialogue.
More...
The Polish publishing market of the 1970s produced a wealth of advice books on topics such as hygiene, manners, interpersonal relationship, sex and family life as well as timemanagement (from day-to-day planning to general life planning). Hygiene manuals, for instance, were used to train children in primary and secondary schools to live in socialist families. Examining the context of life manual writing as a genre, Zawadzka focuses on three aspects – modernisation, urbanisation and class advancement. She also asks what brand of socialism was being promoted in the 1970s, when this type of writing encouraged specific practices and attitudes.
More...
Review: S. Buryła, Rozrachunki z wojną [Settling Accounts with War], Wydawnictwo Instytutu Badań Literackich PAN, Warsaw 2017.
More...
Review: Agata Agnieszka Konczal, Antropologia lasu: Leśnicy a percepcja i kształtowanie wizerunków przyrody w Polsce [An Anthropology of the Forest: Foresters and the Perception and Creation of Images of Nature in Poland], Wydawnictwo Badań Literackich PAN, Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, Warsaw-Poznań 2017
More...
This essay argues for the importance of re-evaluating the medieval genres and genre theories. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s notion of “form-of-life,” based on monastic practice, the essay considers how early writing represents genre as intrinsically linked with experience and practice. In medieval genres, taxonomies, prescriptions, and conventions take shape within a lifeworld of text and practice. And, for this reason, early genre and genre theory complicate some of the binaries on which later genre theory sometimes relies: the instrumental and the aesthetic, the innovative and the conventional, the pure form and the hybrid, the read and the performed.
More...
Duda presents an aspect of his research on men who supported the emancipation of Polish women at the turn of the twentieth century. He discusses writers who called for universal and equal voting rights for both sexes, highlighting Edward Prądzyński’s book as well as journalistic writing by Eugeniusz Starczewski and Jan Urban. A key event is Leon Petrażycki’s speech to the First Duma in 1906. Petrażycki, a university professor and delegate, headed a sub-commission on women’s rights, and he worked with the Związek Równouprawnienia Kobiet (Union for the Equal Rights of Polish Women) in Saint Petersburg. His speech was translated into Polish, French, Italian, English and German. This episode of the First Duma is a key example of men’s efforts to support the voting rights reforms that were composed and declared following the 1905 Russian Revolution.
More...
Lisek discusses the reactions of Yiddish Women writers to the events of 1918 and Poland’s newly regained independence. Her focus is on women’s social and political work as well as their creative work. Both aspects – the development of women’s movements (Zionist, socialist and orthodox) and the heyday of Jewish Women’s writing – reflect an optimism resulting from newly arising opportunities as well as an increased anxiety and sense of alienation rooted in the traumatic experience of World War I and the wave of pogroms that followed in its wake. Lisek refers to the activist work of Pua Rakowska, Dina Blond, Sarah Schenirer as well as the creative work of writers such as Rachel Korn, Sarah Reisen and Roza Jakubowicz.
More...
In the Kingdom of Poland, Paulina Kuczalska-Reinschmit (1859-1921) and other feminists founded various women’s associations with an emancipatory agenda. From the 1880s until the outbreak of World War I they were facing double adversity: a state that was hostile on account of their national background and a society that resisted their claim to general enfranchisement regardless of sex. The Russian Revolution was a turning point in the history of women’s associations and emancipatory discourse, for women now demanded equal civil rights. Until 1905, men and women were usually presented as engaged in a common struggle for equal rights. However, when Polish politicians refused to satisfy the feminists’ demands, women began to see themselves as fighting on their own. Zawiszewska’s methodology is inspired by Polish scholarship on women’s social history and emancipatory discourses, which highlights the role of associations in constructing a modern civil society.
More...
Zofia Dembińska (1905-1989) co-founded the Czytelnik Publishing House, was deputy minister of education and member of the UN Commission on the Status of Women. These achievements inspire Mrozik to call her a “woman architect of the Polish People’s Republic”. Examining Dembińska’s life and work, Mrozik not only rescues her from oblivion, but above all she examines the current state of feminist biographical theory and practice in Poland. The fact that women communists tend to be passed over in silence, she suggests, confirms the dominant national paradigm. Drawing on the work of Levke Harders and Antoinette Burton – theorists of biography and historians of the women’s movement – Mrozik argues that we need to rethink the subject of feminist scholarship. Calling for a more critical and contextualised and historicised perspective on the questions we ask and our own descriptive categories, she also indicates the challenges and opportunities that a transnational turn would present to scholars of history and biography.
More...
This paper addresses the construction of subjectivity in W.G. Sebald’s quasiautobiographical writings, Vertigo, The Rings of Saturn, and Campo Santo. The fragmentary nature and ambiguous ontological status of the subject in Sebald’s prose allow him to associate it with the poetics of German Romanticism of the Jena circle, which defined subjectivity as a pure imagination that only synthesises experience. Sebald’s reported experience includes travels, reading and characters found in books, as well as reflections on the impossibility of representing mass destruction and death. The problem of subjectivity is made even more complicated by the use of photographs, which suggests the truth of visual perception although some of the persons or objects in the photographs do not correspond to their descriptions.
More...
Jasnowski explores Lukas Bärfuss’s novel Koala to highlight the impact of free-market fundamentalism on mental health. He juxtaposes the diagnoses proposed by Bärfuss with theoretical works by Carl Walker and Mark Fisher, who have linked the epidemic of depression (and increased suicide rates) to the neoliberal status quo. Jasnowski also asks how to overcome the current impasse. Like Bärfuss he believes that literature can be a tool of resistance and emancipation. “The failure of the future,” Bärfuss argues, can only be reversed through a clash of what seems permanent, fixed and unchangeable (the system) with that which is unlimited, abysmal and infinite in its potentiality (fiction).
More...
Review: M. Januszkiewicz, W poszukiwaniu sensu: Phronesis i hermeneutyka [Searching for Meaning: Phronesis and Hermeneutics], Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, Poznań 2016; M. Januszkiewicz, Być i rozumieć: Rozprawy i szkice z humanistyki hermeneutycznej [To Be and to Understand: Essays in Hermeneutic Humanities], Instytut Myśli Józefa Tischnera, Cracow 2017.
More...
Baczyński offers a contribution to the biography of the Polish writer Stanisław Vincenz (1888-1971). Drawing on sources such as parish records, documents produced by Austrian authorities in Galicia and source publications from the period, he presents a part of the writer’s genealogy in as much detail as can be determined at present. The earliest piece of information about Karol Vincenz, an ancestor of Stanisław, dates from 3 April 1786 and can be found in the parish register of the Catholic Church in Lviv. Baczyński portrays a few ancestors and relatives on the writer’s maternal and paternal sides. This information sheds light on genealogical motifs in Vincenz’s work, especially in the tetralogy Na wysokiej połoninie [On the High Uplands].
More...
The writers Czesław Miłosz and Anna Kowalska met during World War II, and the letters they exchanged in the years 1948-50 represent a continuation of their acquaintance. Their main function was to exchange information, for instance on the publication of the work Miłosz submitted to Zeszyty Wrocławskie, a quarterly of which Kowalska was an editor; topics also include Miłosz’s writing and cultural work in the United States and the two writers’ respective family lives, especially Kowalska’s, who was recently widowed. In his letters to Kowalska Miłosz makes rare allusions to his increasingly difficult situation as a poet involved in the diplomatic service at a time when Poland’s politics of culture were becoming more restrictive. Their correspondence testifies to a dialogue between two connoisseurs and lovers of literature who held each other in high esteem.
More...
The mathematical word problem is an applied form that appears in most school exercise books, but it has never been studied by literary scholars. This remarkably conventionalised genre is characterised by a certain duality, combining a short anecdote with a calculating task or an algebraic equation. The relationship between word and number recalls various contexts – linguistic, philosophical, theological, and especially literary. The genre shares characteristics with the syllogism and the riddle (gadka). Its similarity with the enigma suggests an oral genesis and a proximity to folklore, while the text version appears at the same time as the earliest writing (cuneiform). Nawarecki reconstructs the rich history of the form, highlighting the period of the Polish People’s Republic, where the teaching of mathematics was subject to ideologisation. Recalling his own childhood and schooling he adds a few personal considerations.
More...