The 2016 referendum in the UK and then Brexit itself, formally introduced in 2020 and finalized – upon the conclusion of the transition period – at the beginning of 2021, have significantly affected the status of the border on the island of Ireland. Once the UK left the European Union, the border that separates the Republic of Ireland from Northern Ireland became an EU border as well. Although overnight the lives of the Irish people crossing the border did not change that much, gradual, and far-reaching, transformations have been taking place in the minds of the Irish and the British and in the overall economic, social and political circumstances on both sides of the old/new border. This essay seeks to address the Irish border’s history as well as its cultural and geopolitical contexts, based on the most useful insights of border studies. That perspective is enriched by elements of cultural memory studies to develop a position sensitive to the needs and aspirations of the border communities and individual borderlanders, who look for support and inspiration to their own local cultures and literary discourses. The aim of this essay is to explore various facets of the Irish border in light of the 2016 referendum’s results and ramifications. What is characteristic of the Tory neoimperialist vision and rhetoric in the UK is its disregard for the local, minority and regional issues on the island of Ireland. In consequence, the status of the 56 per cent of the inhabitants of Northern Ireland who voted “Remain” in the 2016 referendum may be described as that of a marginalized minority in their own country. 

In today’s Central Europe ethnolinguistic nationalism is the region’s standard normative ideology of statehood creation, legitimation and maintenance. This ideology proposes that in spatial terms, the area of the use of national language X should overlap with the territory of nation-state X, in which all members of nation X should reside. In terms of cultural policy, this means that only works written by “indubitable” members of nation X in language X can be seen as belonging to culture X. This self-limiting pattern of ethnolinguistic “purity” (homogeneity) excluded from 20th century Polish literature much of traditional Polish-Lithuanian culture and numerous authors writing in other post-Polish-Lithuanian languages than Polish. Democratization that followed the fall of communism in 1989 partly transcended this ethnolinguistic exclusion, but the old national policy has been back since 2015.

This article discusses the American avant-garde movement called New Narrative, which originated in the 1970s, as well as the poetic strategies that accompanied its socio-political involvement in the cause of emancipation of sexual minority groups. The author discusses the output of three representatives of this movement: Eileen Myles, Magdalena Zurawski, and CA Conrad, whose work and artistic activity have focused on the problems of civil rights and the freedoms, or lack thereof, of LGBTQ+ persons in the United States. The author undertakes an analysis of the three artists’ output within the context of the philosophical reflections of Joseph-Achille Mbembe on the necropolitics, a body of ideas currently investigated in the US in relation to queer identity and queer practices.  

In this article, the term “minor literatures”, coined by Deleuze and Guattari, finds its application in studies of contemporary Mediterranean writing. The author of the article combines this term with the notion of transculture. On the basis of examples from texts by authors such as Juan Goytisolo, Driss Chraïbi, Edmond Amran El Maleh, Najat El Hachmi, and Fouad Laroui, the author shows how literature created by migrating minorities introduces a dimension of synergy to a world marked by intercultural tensions, creating a new sense of community in individuals who radically deconstruct their identities.

This article discusses narrative strategies of resistance in postcolonial literature in the context of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s work on minor literature. The predominant question is whether there is an affinity between Deleuzian thought and the problems of post-colonial theory. Some answers can be found in the book Deleuze and the Postcolonial, edited by Simone Bignall and Paul Patton. The use of language by minor literature has also been discussed in relation to Jacques Derrida’s reflections on the appropriation of foreign languages and monolingualism. The aim of this article is to ponder first, why post-colonial literature has been regarded as “minor” in the sense proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and second, how it uses the many potentialities offered by language to express subaltern experiences and identities. 

This article is concerned with literature created in Spain in the minority language of Catalan, examining the question of whether this literature could ever overcome its stereotypical reputation as peripheral. The article is also concerned with the reception of this literature, both from synchronic perspective – contemporaneous with Catalan playwright Àngel Guimerà, in Catalonia, Spain and abroad – and the diachronic perspective of the turn of the 20th century. The impetus to address this topic has come from renewed and ultimately unsuccessful attempts by Àngel Guimerà’s compatriots to nominate him for the Nobel Prize in Literature. 

A short prose by Gherasim Luka, one of the leading representatives of Romanian surrealism of the 1940s, reflecting the author’s interests in occultism and psychoanalysis on the one hand and the theory of a surreal object on the other. This work documents a combination of the poetics of “orthodox” surrealism with strictly autobiographical narration based on personal experience. 

A short prose by Gherasim Luka, one of the leading representatives of Romanian surrealism of the 1940s, reflecting the author’s interests in occultism and psychoanalysis on the one hand and the theory of a surreal object on the other. This work documents a combination of the poetics of “orthodox” surrealism with strictly autobiographical narration based on personal experience. 

The interview by Marta Baron-Milian and Piotr Bogalecki with Jakub Kornhauser, who has been translating Gherasim Luca’s prose works from Romanian and French and popularizing them, aims at locating the bilingual oeuvre of the author of The Passive Vampire within the field of Romanian and French literature and on the map of avant-garde practices, particularly considering the history of surrealism. The problems raised in the interview focus on the workings of history in Luca’s texts, on their political character, and the undertaken interpretations are directed at attempts to capture the oeuvre of this author inter alia through the prism of the marrano figure, economic metaphors and stammer, which is a peculiarity of Luca’s language both in poetry and in prose.

The article endeavours to present the “theory of love” of the Romanian writer Gherasim Luca and to place it within the wider context of reflections on the pleasure of writing/reading in literary theory. On the one hand, Luca’s prose works are analysed taking into consideration his approaches to the theme of love and its conceptual understanding: for love, according to the writer, should be treated as the highest act of transgression, a revolutionary activity enabling us to lay bare the mystifications of identity projects. On the other hand, however, it influences the composition and the style of Luca’s poems, shaping their exuberance and “debauchery”, justifying the eccentric syntax and the richness of vocabulary. The theory of love, therefore, is a lens that focuses all the important issues in Luca’s avant-garde quests: it enables him to build a labile and ontologically uncertain world, in which interpersonal and also interobject relations are always in a state of flux, and the poetic language undergoes the trial of permanent experimentation. 

The paper analyzes the notion of objectively offered object (OOO) which is a crucial part of Gherasim Luca’s Surrealist oeuvre. In the manifesto-like foreword to his early masterpiece, The Passive Vampire, Luca masterminds the game of constructing collage objects, which gain supranatural powers when offered to somebody. Becoming a fetish, the OOO could be interpreted in Hartmut Böhme’s terms as ambivalent and unapproachable thing, shifted between desire and anxiety. With this concept Luca proves the predominant role of the Surrealist object in the theories and textual praxis of the Romanian avant-garde. 

The main aim of this article is to open a discussion on literary and other, related strands in the works of two artists from Upper Silesia: Antoni Halor and Zygmunt Stuchlik. They belong to the Katowice neo-avant-garde environment gathered around the group called Oneiron, active around 1970. The author analyses the relations between textual and visual strands in the oeuvres of both the artists. The article consists of two parts. The first part contains an introductory exploration of Halor’s Kopertografika, which is a pioneering work of mail art in Poland, as well as a brief analysis of a few translations of this author, published in single copies as art books. The second part is devoted to Stuchlik and contains an analysis of his oneiric small prose works and a poem that has by now been archived. 

 This article offers an analysis of selected metaphors used by Krzysztof Uniłowski in his literary-critical discourse. The underlying assumption is that metaphors used by critics play a vital role in their overall communication strategy. The texts that represent Krzysztof Uniłowski’s literary criticism have been analyzed through the lens of cognitivism, but also takes into account semiology and the performative dimension of metaphors. The first example of metaphor is the image of the “abyss of the PRL” (the People’s Republic of Poland), regarded in geographical-topological terms. Another example is “the rule of overcoming”, which represents modernist literature in its relation to natural law. Next, the article analyses the memetic aspect of metaphors. This approach has allowed Uniłowski to borrow insight from the hard sciences, which he uses to solve the problem of the rule of modernism, carrying certain terminology used in mathematics into literary studies. The author of this article arrives at conclusions concerning the interdisciplinary character of criticism as placed between literature, science, and journalism. This position of critical discourse requires that the critic carry out his or her research in the form of public discourse, aided by the appropriate linguistic devices.