This essay is intended as an appreciation of an overlooked element of Chinese material culture: discarded blue bricks from demolished shikumen houses in Shanghai. It contemplates the concept and materiality of a wall from a unique perspective, combining insights from Chinese architecture history and scholarly tradition of appreciating stones. Combining scientific and poetic approaches, the author argues that these bricks can be contemplated analogically to ink landscape paintings and famous Dali dreamstones. The author uses these clay objects as a starting point to reflect on the rapid transformation of Chinese cities and complex relationship between enduring tradition and ongoing modernization.

This paper considers the parallels between the changes in Shanghai’s brick usage through history and the city’s shifting identities. Taking a new angle on studies of the Chinese wall, the author looks at the most basic element of the wall – the brick – in the context of Shanghai’s social and political history and postcolonial theory and proposes that it was the changes in the city’s identity, precipitated by both internal and external forces, that have ultimately driven the selection and subsequent interpretation of brick types during different periods of history. This paper also considers how brick usage is employed today to reinterpret history and define heritage.

In this article, Dorota Kołodziej analyses the functioning of the figure of walls in Witold Wirpsza’s mature poetry. Although he used this theme in his early poetry, e.g., the 1953 poem List o Sumieniu, Wirpsza fully developed this figure in the 1960s and 1970s, in poems inspired by experiences from his life in West Berlin. Passages in Faeton (Phaeton), Traktat skłamany, and Wykorzenienie are significant contributions to serious reflection on the cultural image of the city and on the functioning of the border. The problem of space-sharing, however, found its fullest expression in the 1978 poem Walls, in which the best known barriers in history (the Great Wall of China, the Berlin Wall, ghetto walls, and the Wailing Wall) are the starting point for reflections on the anthropological sources of the need to erect barriers, on the functioning of memory in a city haunted by specters of the past, and – finally – on the relationship between the inside and the outside. By constructing images of moving walls, Wirpsza reveals the paradoxical nature of these notions and the absurdity of this hard opposition, but also stresses the fact that we cannot free ourselves from it.

This article addresses the issue of world-building as related to the strategies of delimiting the openness of the gameworld. Specifically, it treats of the role of a borderline that restricts both the range of exploration and the gaming experience. By using tools supplied by cognitive and transmedial narratology and by referring to empirical studies in thermal mapping of explorable game space, Krzysztof M. Maj inquires whether the use of focalization and of the knowledge of the narrative field of view can offer deepened immersive exploratory experiences and a greater freedom of choice – aspects crucial for the full enjoyment of a genuinely open world. Maj supports his theses with world-centered analyses of selected video games (Cyberpunk 2077, Skyrim, Total War: Warhammer II, Divinity II: Ego Draconis and others). His goal is to emphasize the most crucial aspects of an open gameworld and, most importantly, to decide what this “openness” actually refers to.

This article offers a reinterpretation of Herman Melville’s famous short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street”, which has been interpreted countless times. Jerzy Franczak describes the operations of “Bartleby’s factory” and polemically refers to all the readings that attribute a subversive and community-forming potential to the idiosyncratic formula of resistance repeated by the protagonist. The trope of the wall is central to Franczak’s line of interpretation. He understands it as the protagonist’s projection of external necessities: unchanging rules that govern the social world. By supplementing Marxist approaches (especially that of Leo Marx) with concepts taken from Jacques Rancière’s writings, Franczak is able to develop a perspective which weakens the deterministic vision of an individual oppressed by the socioeconomic destiny. In Franczak’s interpretation, Bartleby is a victim of his own fatalism, while the lawyer-narrator, commonly portrayed as an embodiment of the system of power, is a political entity whose project of building a shared platform for understanding and acting falls through.

The Gdańsk Shipyard has many functions in contemporary practices and discourses of memory. It is used as the point of departure for various animation, anthropological and artistic explorations which make over the experience of the Polish transformation and its social and political consequences. Similar ambiguity is found in interpretations of the walls of the Shipyard, construed as a place of meaning particularly dense for the cultural imaginarium: symbolizing either civic initiatives that facilitate open negotiations of the rules of social life or, alternatively, the closed and increasingly culturally distant world of the labor of factory communities condemned, after 1989, to live on the periphery of society. In her examination of the animation-artistic activities related to the walls of the Shipyard after 2012, Marta Rakoczy focuses on the Stocznia jest kobietą [Shipyard Is a Woman] project carried out by the Arteria Association and on Iwona Zając’s animation and mural activities. Rakoczy adopts the perspective of the anthropology of the word and oral history in an attempt to ask questions about the identity-fashioning processes initiated by the Shipyard’s artistic activities related to gender, class, the body and technology, and about the presence and absence of the wall as an important catalyst for these processes.

In this article, Marta Brzezińska-Pająk looks at the Berlin Wall through the prism of selected feature films and documentaries relating to the events of 1989. The starting point of her considerations is the assumption that the media dimension was particularly important at the final stage of the history of the Berlin Wall. Television played an important role, among other things, in documenting the steps leading to the political breakthrough of 1989, as reflected in the films analyzed by Brzezińska-Pająk. The ways in which they present the medium of the television in the context of the fall of the Berlin Wall not only relate to the historical circumstances in which this medium functioned, but also have a symbolic potential in that they allow us to see in this wall a medium of sorts which defined the unusual nature of the German-German border.

In her interview with Tomasz Bąk, author of several books of poetry, Zuzanna Sala talks, among other things, about his latest books, ways of thinking about the future, the post-pandemic era and the climate crisis.

A presentation of Tomasz Bąk’s poetry, including the poems: „Uroki cyfryzacji” [The Charms of Digitalization], „Turniejowy czerwiec” [June Tournaments], „Shredder shredder (Niszczarka)”, „Path of Wellness”, „Próbuję skupić się na oddechu” [I’m Trying to Concentrate on Breathing], „Pamiątka po poprzednim właścicielu Anty-Edypa” [A Keepsake after the Former Owner of Anti-Oedipus].

In critical overviews of recent Polish poetry, Tomasz Bąk, the author of Bailout, is mentioned among the last decade’s most important debutants. Scholars include Bąk’s project in their ongoing debate over the forms of poetic involvement, but they often ignore an important aspect of his poetry, one that relates to languages. This aspect can be regarded as consisting of at least two levels. Oskar Meller examines the mechanisms of “speaking in tongues” in Bąk’s books of poetry following his debut. The first level of this poet’s work in languages stems from his use of the Debordian détournement, thanks to which the poet “captures” foreign registers, the languages of the media, of social discourses, and of neoliberal economics. The second level concerns sequelization, manifested in a number of ways: the mining of tradition, the spoofing of formulas, repeating other poets’ phrases, and finally inventing his own idioms. This echolalia of diction is present in the construction of the subject called the “schizophrenic collective”, which testifies to the extremely consistent synchronicity of Bąk’s entire project.

The year 2021, which marks the 10th anniversary of Tomasz Bąk’s literary debut, invites us to examine the poet’s work and his achievements from many perspectives. In her reflections, Agnieszka Budnik analyses and interprets Bąk’s poetry through the prism of his awards. She treats the literary award as an institution and a nodal point, which makes possible the reading of the poetic text up close and simultaneously from a distance. This approach allows Budnik to position Bąk’s poetry in the broader context of a poetic field and thus to uncover, if only partially, the mechanisms at work in that field. Literary awards are not, she argues, a point-like event in the annual literary calendar; rather, they operate like an institution by managing the flow of the author’s prestige, the operations of publishing houses, the tastes of readers (including critics and jurors), and even the shape of the community (thanks to the fact that they affect the formation of
the literary canon). Seen from this perspective, Bąk’s poetry can be regarded as a model example of these processes: it came into being and has evolved thanks to awards, but awards have also caused it to be petrified.

This article offers an analysis of Tomasz Bąk’s poetry from the perspective of the possibility of reclaiming future-oriented imagination. This poetry provides a critique of post-Fordist capitalism and simultaneously explores the realm of utopian thinking. The article ponders the way in which poetry can respond to the crisis of the imagination caused by the paralysis of Mark Fisher’s capitalist realism. Bąk’s poem Bailout is a firm declaration of the poet’s belief in a positive future as a viable alternative to the process of the erasure of futurity, which is an essential paradigm of semiocapitalism and post-Fordism.

In this article, the author explains the connection between literature and economy on a philosophical level, especially in case of logic of exchange and concept of mimesis in novels. Basic tools for his arguments are derived from Georges Bataille’s concept of Accursed Economy (from the essay “The Accursed Share”). The French philosopher argues that in our everyday reality we use logic imposed on us by capitalism, which means that the value of everything is measured by its utility and, at the same time, values of all things can easily be accumulated. Because of that blind belief something important is omitted – surplus, a particle which does not fit into the global system of exchange. In the author’s opinion this phenomenon (and all its consequences) can be used to interpret the novel Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville, showing the main character’s activities (or their lack) in different contexts. This interpretation also proves the usefulness of applying some tools and terms from the language of economics into literary studies.

The vast majority of Holocaust victims and survivors were Ashkenazim. Their main language was Yiddish. Yiddish is very close to German, the main difference being that the former is written in Hebrew letters, while the latter in Latin ones. Postwar Europe’s moral foundation is Holocaust remembrance. But this remembrance to be effective, it must be active in the absence of Holocaust survivors. A way to ensure that could be the novel school and university subject of Yiddish for reading purposes. As a result, researchers and interested Europeans would start reading documents and books in Yiddish again. Germany’s premiere cultural organization, Goethe-Institut, is uniquely well-placed and morally obligated to facilitate the relaunch, popularization and cultivation of the skill to read Yiddish-language sources and publications for both the sake of research and for pleasure.

In this article, Marta Koronkiewicz discusses the category and concept of normality as central to the literary-critical discourses of the 1990s and the early 2000s. She documents the functions and meanings of this concept while presenting it in a broader socio-political perspective by regarding it as crucial for the transformation of the whole area of Central and Eastern Europe (Alexander Kiossev, Magda Szcześniak, Ivan Krastew–Stephen Holmes). The article focuses on the specificity of the concept itself, which seems to be devoid of concrete content and which denotes a desire or an expectation rather a desired or an expected object. Understood in this way, the category of normality can be used to extinguish discussions and to create false agreements. Koronkiewicz examines the consequence of the popularity of this category for the narrative about the most recent literature. She shows that, in the history of Polish literary criticism after 1989, normality initially took on the function of a general term used to describe the desired literary reality / literary life (oriented mainly on diversity, multiplicity, horizontality), and that around 2000 its meaning changed and it began being used to refer to facts: the marginalization of literature, the lack of a platform for criticism, the commodification of the book.