The article is devoted to the functioning of the notion of „history” in Michel Foucault’s methodological project. The subject of interest is the author of Discipline and Punish as a theoretician of the historiography, literature and textual self-creation. In other words, the article discusses Foucault’s three projects: 1) a revision of history as a research subject – from understanding it in categories of continuity and identity to perceiving it in categories of non-continuity and differences, 2) interpretative and inter-textual literature – and its history of the same type, 3) „the aesthetization of existence”.

The article deals with the issue of alternative, counterfactual and non-existent stories. The first part distinguishes between literary and historiographic presentations of non-existent worlds – literary visions of alternative stories by Philip Dick or Richard Harris are confronted with texts by Niall Ferguson or Alexander Demandt. The second part discusses methodological-philosophical issues connected with writing about non-existent past while the last one was devoted to the Muse of Distant Journeys by Teodor Parnicki, a novel in which two counterfactual stories appear, a journey with a father which did not happen because of Brunon Parnicki’s death, as well as the history of the fourth kingdom when Poland won the war after the November Uprising. Parnicki uses both literary and historiographic conventions of alternative stores in his works. On the one hand, he researches the subject-matter, e.g. summarises the history of the alternative nation, and, presents episodes from a literary-political history of the fourth kingdom on the other.

The article concerns the problem of literary references of the fantasy trend to history. The author reviews various contemporary Polish fantasy novels by Sapkowski, Komuda, Jabłoński, Dębski and others) in which strictly historical knowledge was mixed with fabrications and magic elements. The conception of Sapkowski’s „retelling” and euhemerization (historical literalization of legendary figures and mythic events) was referred to.

The article contrasts three novels of the end of the 19th century concerning Ancient Rome confronted with the birth of Christianity. Works by Kraszewski, Sienkiewicz, and Jeske-Choiński allow the author to explain the reasons of dealing with the issues in question (among others experienced crisis or the close of modern culture).

The very text, the formal basis of which constitutes the analysis of Kuchenne schody, the tenth volume of a big novel cycle by Rougon.Macquart constitutes an attempt to multiply Emil Zola and present one more dimension of the very author and his work; no longer denied dignity and faith of spoil painter and naturalist eliminated by theoreticians, but a piercing diagnostician in a generation contemporary to him deciphering correctly reflections of decadence. This time, decadence is not marked aristocracy, as one may presume, but middle class and bourgeois in the most bourgeois version. In Zolafs works former heroes of resolution suddenly transform into immoralists avid for the consumption in whom a feverish pursuit of pleasures is merely a form of concealing satiety and spiritual exhaustion of characters.

The subject of the article is a mechanism of popularising historical knowledge, that is, a situation in which the past becomes the good while the receivers the „consumers of the history”. The subject of interpretation illustrating the problem are the novels Boski Juliusz (1961) and Nazo poeta (1969) by Jacek Bocheński. In the first text, the narrator-antiquarian, in the second, the narrator-master of ceremony, tell the ancient story, giving it an attractive form of antiquarian’s records and stage productions. In both cases, narration takes place in space which is commercial in nature that is why the products created in it, an antiquarian and master of ceremony narration, also become the market aim. Thus, narrators take on the function of trade intermediary offering customers the knowledge about the past. As intermediaries, they bring knowledge about historical facts within the history understood as a university discipline into the area of a colloquial historical awareness.

A large Prologue to the second part of the Face of the Moon by Teodor Parnicki shows a mechanism of a complicated bureaucratic-counterintelligence in Byzantium in the middle of the fifth century. The task of agents (recruited among unemployed rhetoricians) is to make the most precise reports, however, as Tomasz Burek, a critic, has noticed, they do not follow the course of events. After years, similar remarks were made by Ryszard Koziołek in his work devoted to Parnicki’s trilogy. Referring to these remarks, the author of the article claims that a dynamic relation between an event and word in Parnicki’s novel is similar to a „source difference” typical of a language of deconstruction. Thus, one can speak of analogies between Parnicki’s prose from the 1960s and Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction deriving from the criticism of phenomenology at the same time. Eventually, the history taking place seems to be an event muddle in Parnicki’s works, around which something happens, though, we cannot definitely say what happens in fact. Reality, „ungraspable and unembraceable” becomes marked with stereotypical female features, taking on the status of an unapproachable object of desire. At the same time, it is being constantly disciplined by écriture masculine, an institutionalised discourse of a patriarchal culture while a monstrous SCHOLA AGENTORUM from the Prologue to Parnicki’s novel may successfully be considered a hyperbole of such a discourse. Maksymian, the main protagonist, chooses another discourse which is confronted with a Nietzschean principle of vita femina.

The image of God in ***[„Śnieg jak wieko żelazne”…] by Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński may become not only a key to the poem interpretation, but also a starting point for considerations concerning the poet’s perception of history. Theological aspects are tightly connected with historio-philosophical ones whereas the image of God reflects the changes taking place in the subject of the poem as it recognizes the sense of the history. A diagnosis concerning the history of the world, formulated in the poem, is the result of the image of God in which Christian, Judaic and mythological elements have been combined. The very measures give an insight into an effort taken in order to search for the sense of the history at the time of extermination. At the same time, however, one can notice „self-therapeutic” actions , the subject of the text finds the world’s Logos. Also, poet’s poetical imagination, contaminated with cruelty and evil, gets restored.

The author of the article reflects on the category of memory in poetry by Julia Hartwig who constitutes the identity of the lyrical subject through a constant reference to the past. The motive of eyesight and photography, as noticed in frames, overlaps with the idea of repetition, being memory’s work against emptiness. The reality of the history, uncovered and turned inside out by a poetical „I”, combines with a dreamy vision and sub-consciousness many times. The role of memory turns out to be two-fold; a destructive and sense-illuminating one, including the element of distance and sublime. Distance in the light of memory demythologizes it, exposing „infidelity” in the light of what it has been entrusted with. Miłosz’s conception of testimony as a proof of existence appears important for considerations on memory in poetry by Hartwig. When confronted with a desire to retain things in a whole image, the awareness of emptying memory is consolidated by a dramatic nature of the attitude visible in works by the author of Czułość.

Te author of the article reconstructs a discussion concerning a crisis of a „literary quality” within Shoah’s presentations. Initially, as a part of discussion, the literature of the Holocaust was getting closer to the forms connected with the document according to the plan. The theoreticians pointed to the chronicle as a form close to an ideal version which would allow for a literal presentation of facts concerning the Extermination. In the context of the argument around a figurative language, what seems interesting is Alvin H. Rosenfeld’s position expressed in A Double Dying. Reflection on Holocaust Literature. The author of a Double Dying explains why a „literary quality” becomes a desirable element in descriptions of the Extermination. He emphasizes that the poetic nature of prose and a literary „image” of the very event is most strongly retained in the memory. Polish and foreign researchers have been highlighting the importance and function of a metaphor, irony, grotesque, symbols and myths present in narrations on the Extermination, even those non-literary by nature since the turn of the 1980s and 1990s.

The author considers theoretical entanglements of cartoon presentations of the Holocaust. In the beginning he reminds of exclusive researchers’ opinions claiming that the truth about this horrible event is either substantially narrativised, structures in subsequent literary presentations or a description allows for pure and „non-literary” facts exclusively as any other attitude is considered unethical. A detailed analysis of Maus by Art Spiegelman and Josel by Joe Kubert, allows for treating the former as a group of narrativised texts while the latter as the group of chronicle ones. The very dichotomic division is doubtful from the very beginning. The author points to various combinations of factographic and constructivist qualities in each cartoon. The aim of the article is to formulate a hypothesis according to which a narrator telling about the Extermination is divided into a textual and extra-textual „I”, as a result of which the whole story is fictitious in nature and testifies to a substantial non-transmittability of the truth about the Holocaust.

Slavoj Žižek in one of his books (In Defense of Lost Causes) suggests thinking over the conception of „the time of project” by Jean-Pierre Dupuy as a future project of the left wing. For the French, „the time of Project” is „the time of a closed measurement between the past and the future, the future is a resultative product of our actions from the past, the way we act is defined by our anticipation of the future and reaction to this anticipation”. Thus, it goes about introducing a new (non-linear) notion of time, which, as the only one, can help us face a global (whether it be an ecological or cosmic) disaster. Such a perspective must raise doubts, especially in the context of remarks made by Carl Marx himself on the one hand, developed in All That Is Solid Melts Into Air by Marshall Berman, and on the other, in the light of the newest models delivered by contemporary science which assume that knowledge or the assumption itself in relation to the future changes of our way of thinking about it, and, even more, the future as such.

Poems by Darek Foks, Polish contemporary poet.

Conversation with Darek Foks, Polish contemporary poet.

The published source material is composed of censor’s reviews deriving from a set of documents of The Main Office for the Control of the Press, Publications, and Public Performances stored in the Archive of New Acts (AAN) in Warsaw. They concern the following books: Aecjusz – ostatni Rzymianin, I u możnych dziwny, Inne życie Kleopatry, Koła na piasku, Koniec „Zgody Narodów”, Muza dalekich podróży, Nowa baśń (vol. I and II), Opowiadania i szkice, Słowo i ciało, Śmierć Aecjusza, Srebrne orły, Tożsamość, Twarz księżyca, Tylko Beatrycze, Zabij Kleopatrę. A document closing the materials in question is a letter of the editor-in-chief of PIW Publishing House concerning the second part of Nowa baśń, the only translation of this type of a „diplomatic”, and „negotiative” correspondence related to Parnicki’s novel to be found in the AAN.

The author raises the issue of a dissertation by Małgorzata Trębska devoted to Old- Polish wedding orations. The work by Trębska was recognised for its dealing with the subject that has not been discussed, the basis of which was a big source text. The author admires the results of interpretative findings which question a widely-held negative opinion among the researchers on the Sarmatian art of a Hymeneus articulation. She notices that a book should contain a variety of wedding orations in the form of appendices, and reprimands the editorial board for not having prepared the book for publication well.

The author suspiciously analyses the work by Paweł Bohuszewicz on the Polish Baroque romance. She brings the narratological method closer, yet presents a series of doubts and objections against the means of using „fashionable” contemporary humanist works in the work in question. References to Baudrillard’s conception seem unconvincing. Equally unsuccessful was the usage of Foucault’s knowledge about body in Baroque works since their main qualities are more accurately defined by the context of Ignatian or Teresian corporality. One should also question the genological findings achieved by Bohuszewicz, whose conception of literary genres is a combination of old arrangements with too modern ideas, as a result of which still binding conceptions by Opacki and others were not taken into consideration.

The authors make an attempt at a multidimensional description of Ciała Sienkiewicza. Studia o płci i przemocy by Ryszard Koziołek. Above all, they point to cognitive values of the description perspective of the works by the author of Trilogy approved of by the researcher, which definitely diverges from the already-known methodologically traditionalistic achievements connected with Sienkiewiczology. The work by Koziołek gains recognition for being homogeneous in terms of research methods, interpretatively inventive and in the form of a fantastic academic lecture.

The author discusses the work by Przemysław Rojek devoted to the identity narration in the post-war poetry by Aleksander Wat. He describes this interpretative project, highlighting a combination of researcher’s historio-literary and theoretical knowledge who is interested in modern subjectivity of the textual Wat. Rojek builds in his book a wellevaluated construction of a literary auto-bio/bibliography and finds its traces in works by the author of Ciemne świecidło. Wat was trying to rebel against the fragmentarity of life and existence of a modern individual and create a coherent identity project. The very rebellion resulted in failure and destruction of all more long-lasting identity constructs. The author highly evaluates Rojek’s academic achievements who added something new to a well-developing Watology in recent years.

The author criticizes the latest book by Michał Paweł Markowski Życie na miarę literatury. He evaluated it as a book positively differing from early works by an outstanding philologist which resembled a lecture artificialized because of the fact that they were „promotion works”. The latest book enchants with sincerity in presenting his own involvement in reading adventures. Apart from discussing the history of the European modernism and a series of profiles of modern authors, the title text-confession-manifesto appears in which the philologist states that reading has an existential dimension for him as it interrupts the circle of loneliness surrounding the reader. The author notices that reading equals conversation for Markowski, which gets a former deconstructionist to hermeneutics as well as philosophy of dialogue closer.

The author refers to a noble tradition of speech which has been rarely dealt with recently, namely a critical review of the latest books in the market of humanist books abroad (in France to be more specific). He pays attention to 5 books, the first of which is a work by Arambourou-Mélčse devoted to a psychoanalysis in the context of the person of Don Juan. The author of the book polemicizes with Freud’s thought and concludes that it is a debt, not guilt that is a decisive factor in social relationships. Two manualpopularising books that were discussed further show an accessible and full of innovative ideas lecture of de Saussure’s and Habermas’ thought. Especially recognized is the book by Alain Badiou, already-acknowledged in Poland, devoted to the 20th century. He presents various ways of thinking about this century, even provokingly asks about the Nazist thought only to claim in the end that it was a century in which neither a former religious order nor a newer humanist order survived the test of the history. Finally, in final, the author points to a clever work by de Saint-Victor containing a defense of the lower middle class. The character, condemned by everyone, is perceived as a hidden identity of the majority of people reading this book.

Report from the scientific conference 'Między księgami. Badania literackie nad dawną książką' (Katowice 2010).

Statement at the conference 'Literatura i historia' by professor Marek Piechota.

Essay by professor Jerzy Paszek.

The article is devoted to a discussion of the works by Darek Foks in the context of an aesthetic change in poetry these days. The very change is presented on the basis of the comparison of a poetical book by Foks Sto najlepszych polskich reklam i jedna niemiecka with Niskie pobudki by Marcin Świetlicki. In poetry by Świetlicki the issue of the politicality of poetry is defined by a gesture of a radical division of the world into an allienated and external public sphere as well as a private sphere giving rest and the feeling of independence. The poetry by Foks, on the other hand, does not believe the possibility of separating the two orders and criticizes a public order by means of a radical internalization.