The author of the article tries to reconstruct both the way of perceiving subjectivity in the works of Walter Benjamin and the ways in which the tension between identity and history is manifested in his writings. The article concentrates on the concept of shock, developed by the philosopher during reading Baudelaire and Kafka. With this concept, it is possible to describe the transition from the narrative conception of experience to “point experience” constituted by series of sudden unconnected impulses. The moment conducing to this transition was the I World War which for Benjamin – as well as for others significant thinkers of that time – constituted an important turning point.

The text traces the author’s own theoretical inquiries about the function of the poem as an aesthetic object functioning in contemporary environments, from
the earlier concept of “a poem as a speaking organism” to the contemporary slightly modified version of this idea. The modification corresponds with the remarks made by Andrzej Sosnowski who perceives contemporary poetry as the source of a negative and impenetrable performance permanently separated from the fallen world of the society. Moving from the theory of the poem as the „speaking organism” and discussing selected poems by American poets as well as his own, the author tries to develop such a concept which would enable him to protect the critical autonomy of poetry placed within the material and “contaminated” (Sosnowski’s notion) world. This new concept of the poem departs from the theory of an acute material outline and favours the critical re-conceptualizing processes which, according to the author, should occur in the contemporary poem. Such a poem is named by the author “a formal multiply field.”

The article shows literary and documentary presentations of the first years of building Nowa Huta in the context of the avant-garde gesture of blurring the traces of the past and attempting at establishing a completely new beginning. Another equally important goal is to show how Nowa Huta, a model city of socialist visions, was organized by the dialectic of materialization and dematerialization which governed both the rhetoric of architectural visions and descriptions of human – especially women’s – corporeality. The author combines idealized (and therefore immaterial) approach whose ideological senses are projected onto the architecture of a utopian city with the socialistic approach to the body as a precisely shaped form whose biological and generally material qualities are disciplined. The author describes a few attempts of bodily disobedience to the dictate of the form, exposing the gap between postulated construction plans and the reality of everyday life entangled in the materiality of architecture and the biological nature of the body.

The text deals with the influence that women’s movements on the one hand and organizations operating in Poland after 1945 on the other hand had on the poetry of Anna Świrszczyńska. Contrary to the established narrative developed by interpreters of this poetry after 1989, the feminist sensitivity of Świrszczyńska was not an isolated and individual phenomenon, as it grew directly from activities undertaken by women and from women’s organizations in the People’s Republic of Poland as well as during the moral and cultural transformations. Reading Świrszczyńska’s poetry in the light of socialist emancipation projects allows us also to redefine the genealogy of Polish feminism.

The article presents a thorough analysis of William S. Burroughs’s gender theory. In the first part of the text, the author characterizes Burroughs’s standpoint in the fields of literature, art, popculture, and the university. In the second part, the author explains how Burroughs understood the category of sex and gender. The third part is devoted to the way gender is represented in Burroughs’s novel The Wild Boys; in the fourth one, the author presents Burroughs’s conception of “queer” and shows how it corresponds with gender theories of radical feminists. The author concludes by emphasizing most important connections between Burroughs’s vision of sexuality and gender.

The text is devoted to the problem of materiality in the perspective of transmedial artistic practices. The object of special interest is the principle of rapprochement between the medium and non-artistic matter, shown on examples of art that intentionally strengthen its relationship with various materials (so-called matter painting), and on the example of art that to a greater extent is subjected to the processes of dematerialization (hyperrealism, conceptualism). In the works of such painters as Antoni Tàpies, Jean Dubuffet, Lucio Fontana turning to non-literary materials leads to an interesting tension / rapprochement between the materials and the medium. It brings a retreat from the idealistic aesthetics and ahistorically treated matter, and opens up to non-antropocentrically captured objects. In the case of Jeff Wall’s post-conceptual photography, the principle of closeness draws attention to the ability of photography to annex various media. Transmediality, as it manifests itself in both Wall’s paintings of matter and his photographs, may be called, after Jacques Rancière, incommensurability. 

The article traces the evolution of the status of objects, understood as a carrier of creative expression, from the avant-garde concepts of Duchamp readymades or surrealistic “disturbed objects” to neo-avant-garde installations (Spoerri, Anselmo, Černý, Jasielski, Schneider, Bałka, Hasior). The most important point of
reference for the considerations is the belief in the specific autonomy that the object acquires in avant-garde and neo-avant-garde theories. Moving constantly from a usable to artistic context - or at least participating in negotiations between these spheres - an object must also be seen in terms of everyday cultural practices. The author uses the theory of “smart object” developed by artists and art theoreticians (Agata Pankiewicz, Marcin Przybyłka, Roch Sulima) to show relationships between useable objects, which are intentionally non-artistic, but which are in the field of artistic activities (smart objects), with strictly aesthetic artifacts. Considering several selected properties (the degree of interference of the subject and the recipient in the structure of the object, its collagelike and temporary nature, external appearance, the way of functioning in space, the location on the axis of utilitarian / aesthetic), the author tries to extract those aspects of materiality that determine the status object. As it turns out in the case of some conceptual works, it is difficult to distinguish clearly between their artistic and “smart” dimensions. It leads to the elimination of the boundaries between art and non-art, but it also contributes to the conviction that the material nature of the object itself is in a way a guarantee of the “conceptual” character of the work, especially in the era of the dominance of the digital circulation. 

The article concerns Zofia Lipska from Potocki family – a daughter of Polish poet Wacław Potocki. It is the first edition of funeral speech given at the funeral of Zofia Lipska by Aleksander Minor. The manuscript of the speech is a part of Minor’s Silva rerum and it has not been published yet although it constitutes an important supplementation to the biography of Potocki family. The speech is prefaced by an analysis of the text, as well as by the biography of Zofia Lipska and presentation of her image depicted in the poems of her father.

The article is an extensive review of Joseph North’s book Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History. The author divides the 20th and 21st century literary studies into two orientations: critics and researchers, showing that the domination of the research perspective from the 80s led to a paradoxical depoliticization of criticism and deprivation of its intervention potential. To restore the critical potential, North postulates a return to materialistic aesthetics under the sign of I.A. Richards, which allows him to cross the research horizon in a gesture of intervention into a common reality, justified by a specific aesthetic experience.

In his book Rzeczy, których nie wyrzuciłem [Things I Didn’t Throw Out] Marcin Wicha, in a gesture of filial mourning, tries to reconstruct the portrait of his
deceased mother by writing about the objects she has left. Starting from the material, he recreates the behaviours, views, and family memories of his mother, and saves from the oblivion the scenes that most fully reflect her complexity. Wicha’s book is also an expression of rebellion against the ready word formulas used in the face of death as it attempts to create a story that matches only one deceased person. Rzeczy, których nie wyrzuciłem corresponds with other “mourning texts” (works by Różewicz, Iwasiów, Barthes and Zagajewski) but thanks to the author’s skillful oscillation between individual life and general truths, pathos and irony, understatements and exposures, the personal and the literary – the book turns out to be an original example of writing about loss as it avoids banality and sentimentality.

The article discusses Monika Szczepaniak monograph: Habitus żołnierski w literaturze i kulturze polskiej w kontekście Wielkiej Wojny [Habitus Soldier in Polish Literature and Culture in the Context of the Great War]. Following the changes taking place in the Polish habitus at the beginning of the 20th century, the author analyzes the strategies of creating a hegemonic normative militarized masculinity, which in its Polish variant refers to the heroic Romantic-Sarmatian models. In this context, the author discusses minority narratives, presenting various non-heroic masculinity superseded by dominant discourses.

The aim of the review is to discuss the main threads in Marguerite van den Berg’s monograph Gender in the Post-Fordist Urban. The Gender Revolution in Planning and Public Policy (2017). The author of the monograph analyses the city of Rotterdam in terms of gender-specific practices, which, according to the researcher, are consistent with the logic of the post-fordist city.

The article presents discussions on the shape of Polish literary studies which were conducted in connection with the creation of the Historia literatury polskiej [History of Polish Literature] by Feliks Bentkowski. Both the circumstances of the creation of Bentkowski’s work and its reception are presented, with special attention paid to their institutional context, professionalization of philology and bibliography as sciences, as well as to relations between the polemicists. The main part of the article is the reconstruction of the semantics of the historical term “literature”, which is the subject of Bentkowski’s, Jan Śniadecki’s and Gotfryd Ernest Groddeck’s statements. The author advances a thesis that the attempts to define the term “literature” in their texts correspond, in fact, with voices in the debate on the concept of a scientific character of literary studies, which at that time constituted itself as a separate discipline.

The article discusses links between Tomasz Różycki’s Bestiarium [Bestiary] and Bruno Schulz’s texts. Special attention is paid to the motif of wandering (both physical and mental) that can be traced in those works. Another important issue is onirism, inter-textual references and ways of creating the depicted world (mythology of reality, particular motifs, props, schemes). Różycki presents himself as an artist aware of his own work and cultural achievements. He creates an original novel which, at the same time, is strongly rooted in tradition.

The article draws attention to the aesthetic feature of Gombrowicz’s prose as an effect of the unconstrained verbal games (para-logic, homonymies, delexicalisation of phraseologies, etc.) which play a fundamental role in the narratives of the author of Kosmos. Such a narrative strategy can be described with the help of the notion of sprezzatura introduced by Baldasarre Castiglione in The Book of the Courtier (Il Cortegiano, 1528 – in his adaptation of Castiglione’s work the Polish writer of the Renaissance, Łukasz Górnicki, used a neologism “nizaczmienie”). Using the reference to the Renaissance aesthetics of grace (grazia), the author of the article emphasizes the “aristocratic” feature of Gombrowicz’s prose. In this respect, Gombrowicz’s writings differ favorably from the publications of contemporary Polish prose writers (D. Masłowska, M. Sieniewicz, and M. Witkowski). Although the mentioned artists refer to both the poetics and anthropological concepts of Gombrowicz, their works do not achieve a similar degree of narrative freedom. This aesthetic difference is accompanied by a cultural and social difference – the brilliance of Gombrowicz’s narrative was elitist and characteristic of “high modernism”, while modern writers are associated with a more plebeian cultural formation. 

Report from the symposium 'Exhumations – Old and Modern Literature' (University of Silesia in Katowice, May 2018).

Report on Polish Philology Day (Faculty of Philology, University of Silesia in Katowice, March 2018).