The article discusses the literary work of Anna Cieplak, the author of contemporary novels focused on the social and economic challenges in provincial Poland. The analysis centers on the agency of female protagonists affected by traumatic experiences. Notably, these characters do not define themselves by their difficult pasts, and the narrative itself avoids introspection. In Lekki bagaż – which is subjected to the most detailed analysis in the article – as well as in Cieplak’s other novels, violence, although pervasive, does not play a central role in the plot. Instead, what proves crucial is the strategies of action employed by the protagonists, particularly women, who, despite adverse conditions, undertake efforts aimed at changing their circumstances.

The aim of this article is to examine the literary strategies used to depict the relationship between the body and industry, as well as the violence inherent in this relationship, in Anna Cieplak’s novel Ciało huty published in 2023. Arguments are made that the writer, through narrative attempts to “speak with the body,” shows the history of degradation that refers to both the individual bodies and the collective body of female workers from Katowice Steelworks. Spinning a communal tale and launching new mythologies by women leads to the preserva-tion of their lives on everyday basis and in the formation of cultural memory of the region.

The author of the article attempts an ecofeminist analysis of Anna Cieplak’s novel Ciało huty as socially engaged literature. The term “ecofeminism” is taken from Françoise d’Eaubonne’s essay Le féminisme ou la mort and is used to analyze the common space of experienced violence whose victims are na- ture and women. In criticizing the common features of patriarchy and destructive capitalism, the stereotypical identification of masculinity, reason, and technology, situated in opposition to the triad of femininity, intuition, and nature, is pointed out. The author emphasizes the rural origins of the characters in Cieplak’s novel and their folk attachment to the land, confronted with progressive degradation of the natural environment in which the Katowice Steelworks is being built. The novel presents the important similarities between mothers and daughters across generations, analyzing the attempts of the younger generation to return to na- ture. This return is achieved, among other things, through an interest in Friedrich Froebel’s educational methods, as well as the dangers of capitalist exploitation of ecological sensitivity in the form of greenwashing. References to environmental pollution and the heroic figure of Dr Jolanta Wadowska-Król are significant for the presented approach. The interpretation of the novel Ciało huty highlights the strong bond between women and nature, most evident in the descriptions of sexual violence and the community’s response to it, in which the alliance with nature plays an important role. Nature is also shown as accompanying the char- acters in healing the pain of trauma.

The article discusses Urszula Jabłońska’s reportage Światy wzniesiemy nowe (2021) in the context of research in the field of utopian studies and reportage. The article outlines the issues of Jabłońska’s book, pointing out that, on the one hand, it is a narrative about intentional communities, and, on the other, an important voice in the debate on utopian thinking and utopian impulses and their increased presence in the collective imagination from the 20th to the 21st century, being times of growing social tensions and crises. Also, the article shows how Jabłońska’s reportage – which can be considered an example of engaged reportage – fits into the latest research on reportage prose. The multifaceted analysis and interpretation of the reportage allowed us to show that Światy wzniesiemy nowe is not only a proof of the ongoing process of change
in the way we perceive man’s place in the world, but also a valuable testimony of the author’s social and artistic sensitivity.

The article touches upon climbing and speleological themes in Wojciech Kuczok’s prose. The author analyzes traces and potential influences of the poetics of mountaineering literature in Kuczok’s narratives and essays – in selected sketches of the collections Poza światłem, Moje projekcje, in the stories Spiski. Przygody tatrzańskie and the Rozmemuary journal. What is interesting is the relationship with model narrative genres – the bujdałka (a mountain record) and the expedition story, as well as the mode of evoking and activating a central quality of the literary-aesthetic mountaineering relationship, namely, the “corporeal sublime,” which is a response to the problem of expressing the specificity of the kinesthetic experience of the rock vertical space. Kuczok fits into the “kinesthetic culture” typical of mountaineering and speleology – he uses professional lexis, knowledge and discourse. He rewrites his own non-literary movement and space
practices – he fictionalizes and conceptualizes the experience of mountain space, combining it with the literary nature he has developed. A gradual increase in climbing and speleological themes in Kuczok’s work coincides with an increasing popularity of mountain literature and its position in relation to the mainstream
literature.

Krzysztof Holvik’s conversation with Anna Cieplak focuses on the themes which include images of crises present in her novels, narratives of crisis, the issues concerning social engagement of literature, its interventionist nature and the risks involved. In her responses, the author of Ciało huty exposes the socio-political potential of the engaged form and the possibilities offered by its language, in the perception of which she unexpectedly finds inspiration in
avant-garde poetry written under the sign of Julian Przyboś. All these themes are metaphorically intertwined to form the famous metaphor of a writer as “a street exclamation-ary,” giving the title to the entire conversation.

This article outlines the most important determinants of the emergence of the Lublin avant-garde in the 1920s. The peripheral model of avant-gardism generated at that time was dependent on a bundle of modernising processes that determined the rhythm of local artistic life. The history of the Lublin avant-garde is also presented and its most important features are indicated (in relation to other avant-garde poetry models of the time).