The lexeme park should be characterized as an international word. While examining its form and semantics, it is necessary to make references to other languages, primarily to Indo-European ones. A Latin source is pointed out by Jaqueline Picoche – the word parc is derived from Lat. parrĭcus, registered in the 8th century, which was a derivative of the pre-Latin *parra ‘pole, rod’. In this case it is worth asking the following question: what is the source of the root of the word park in the Indo-European Latin language? The form of the word makes us suspect that it is a borrowing from a Semitic language, most likely Arabic. In the Arabic language قرف FRQ carries the meaning ‘to separate, to set apart’, and further nominal formations which are derived from it include farq – ‘separation, division’ and firq ‘part, division; group, herd, set’. The development of the present meaning of the word park represents a broader array of issues associated with the semantic shift. The observation of the lexical material, not only of Polish material, demonstrates the following direction: ‘enclosure → ‘an enclosed (closed) area’ → ‘an area which is not necessarily enclosed’. Such a regularity is observed also in the Old French jardin, in the English garden, in the Slavic words gród (Ch. hrad, Russ. город, OCS гродъ etc.); ogród (ob-gród), kraj (‘end, limit’ → ‘an area within some boundaries’). Today the meaning park ‘garden’, which is a link in the semantic chain, occupies the first place; other meanings are secondary, and the original ‘enclosure’ has become obsolete.

Park as an intentionally formed phenomenon is an example of imposing on reality both anthropocentric patterns and those typical of a specific cultural context. Interpreted against the backdrop of space, nature, landscape, it unravels its power as a human gesture, sign and measure of human nature – expresses a man’s attitude to the world. Founded on the topographical experience, a park gains the status of a place and initiates the processes of taming and naturalization. Everyday being with a park leads to living, which then endows a park with an order of life and identity. To be, to naturalize, to live – these are the practices of existence in the world, deconstructed by the processes of globalisation, including digitalization. While analysing digital realizations
of a park and a park extended over the spaces emitted by the screens and monitors of digital devices in terms of the functions it performs in a modern and postmodern city, this paper asks about contemporary forms of settlement, embodied by virtual and real parks.

The article presents the accounts of Polish diarists’ overseas travels (16th–17th century), which include descriptions of parks and gardens. The authors: Mikołaj Krzysztof Radziwiłł “Sierotka” and Karol Stanisław Radziwiłł, Krzysztof Zawisza, Jan Ocieski, Teodor Billewicz, Maciej Rywocki, and others marvelled at the impressive gardens and bestiaries in France, Italy, Spain and the Holy Land. In the travellers’ accounts – diverse in terms of their attention to detail – there appeared descriptions of gardens, their location and arrangement, together with some opinions and evaluations made by the authors. What drew their particular attention and admiration were magnificent fountains, exotic plants and animals.

The article discusses the transformations of the idea of park in modernity. In the Age of Enlightenment Europe replaced the white of medieval cathedrals with the green of parks. A man, like Candide from Voltaire’s satire, started to “cultivate his garden,” changing private parks in public spaces. As a consequence of that process the idea of park as a place where you could experience beauty and pleasure completely “vanished”. Urban green spaces started to be determined by an efficacy parameter – which can be witnessed in Le Corbusier’s or Ebenezer Howard’s projects – thus opening the way for transforming former landscape parks into modern places of consumption: commercial parks and amusement parks.

The article is devoted to the semantic and composition functions of the figure of a park/garden in Raymond Roussel’s novel Locus Solus. The issue discussed in this paper concerns a pretextual function of fictional space for the narration mode and sequential order of the novel. An attempt is made to supplement the dominant structuralist tradition of interpreting Roussel’s work, for example, with the concepts appearing in Maria Gołaszewska’s eco-aesthetic approach and Arnold Berleant’s environmental aesthetics. The proposed direction of reflections allows us to see in the rhetorical aspects of Roussel’s style, among which numerous hyperboles particularly attract the reader’s attention, a narrative method of anthropologically understood imaginary structures. These structures were based on the systems of objects, whose task, apart from rhetorical and cultural deluding, governed by the poetics of absurd, is to determine an anthropological point of observation in the very problem of visual experience connected with the walk in the park, intended by Roussel as an integral element of the plot. The article points out that the main problem of the novel is garden space seen from the perspective of visual anthropology, with the cultural pattern of an imaginary structure determined by the space. This space is given the function of disinterested narrating. According to the author of the proposed analyses, the meaning of such an understood visual metaphor is carried by two primary figures inscribed in the space of the garden: anamorphosis and ornament.

It is impossible to imagine London without its royal parks. One of the most beautiful among them is Kensington Gardens, forever connected with the figure of a boy who didn’t want to grow up: Peter Pan. This article provides an interpretation of James Matthew Barrie’s novel Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906), centred mainly around literary portrayals of garden space, which becomes an embodiment of the paradise of childhood: Arcadia, a pleasant place, locus amoenus, allowing one to exist beyond evanescence, growing up and sadness. Kensington Gardens are London’s green island, primeval Neverland, where the fairy-tale and the magic are rooted: during a day it creates a playing space for “human children,” whereas at night it goes under the rule of Queen Mab and mysterious fairies. The outline of various interpretation paths which can be followed in Kensington Gardens are accompanied by the reproductions and analyses of Arthur Rackham’s illustrations, which in an outstanding way capture the whimsical genius of the author of Peter Pan.

Based on the fourth part of Pamela Lyndon Travers’s series of children’s books, Mary Poppins in the Park, the article proposes a view of a park as a dychotomic place: subjected to some rules, yet simultaneously a real and magic space which stirs one’s imagination. Following this double understanding, it can be stated that a park ideally matches the title character of the novel, who cares (often too much) about her children’s appropriate behaviour, but at the same time displays her predilection for children plays and imagination games. The conclusion highlights the two-dimensionality of the park, which by welcoming adults and children, becomes the space of both the real and the imaginary.

The work presents an interpretation of Wawrzyniec Żuławski’s Wędrówki alpejskie [Wandering in the Alps], a book which is regarded as an example of classic mountain literature, republished several times. The author focuses her reflections on the description of the Alps, noticing in it three key ways of presenting this mountain range: as “a park of parks”, a playground and a neighbourhood. The analysis of Wawrzyniec Żuławski’s exceptional style unravels the author’s attempts to capture in words “the beauty of mountain experiences.” However, while reading Wędrówki alpejskie, what comes to the foreground is the book’s factual dimension. In his accounts of the expeditions from the 1930s and 1940s, a passionate mountaineer and an artist (a writer and a composer) reports on the changes in civilisation which took place in the area of the most important (in cultural terms) European mountain range as a result of the process of park creation. Moreover, Żuławski depicts in his notes significant cultural transformations in the consciousness of people coming to mountain national parks and in their attitude to the mountainous landscape. On the one hand, what seems to be striking in the accounts which are the subject of our interpretation are the tensions between the ideals of protecting “wild” nature and the development of mass tourism. On the other hand, what is particularly thought-provoking is the sense of melancholy, caused by the awareness of the old “romantic” alpinism being displaced by a sport model, aimed not at “metaphysics of the mountain”, but at achievements and records.

The paper provides an attempt at reincorporating Giszowiec Park in the wider context of the Silesian Forest and locating the mining settlement somehow around the park centre. The idea is connected with the obelisk, which is centrally located in Giszowiec Park and constitutes a geometrical centre of the estate, constructed on a square plan, with a one-kilometre long side. Giszowiec, intended to be a colony, a miners’ village, has a chance for a second life in the age of the restructuring of the mining sector due to its sophisticated composition, whose heart is the park, forming a part of the old forest.

A park is described in this article as a scene of public life where members of the modern society develop their shared forms of behaviour. This is also the perspective of interpretation for the final scene of Witold Gombrowicz’s short story Lawyer Kraykowski’s Dancer. A humorous portrait of manners drawn by the author could constitute a peculiar commentary to the nightlife of the Warsaw parks of the 1920s. A park seems to be a suitable metaphor chosen to tell the story of a lawyer and “a dancer”, as well as of the complex social relations determined by humanizing actions and the feeling of uncertainty about human nature which constantly evades them. The authors of the article are particularly interested in this “uncertain” aspect of nature inscribed in the figure of an urban garden, which reminds us that all our calls for regulation are just an appearance, a veil hiding an always distant phantasm.

Poems by the contemporary Polish poet Natalia Malek.

A Conversation with contemporary Polish poet Natalia Malek.

According to many researchers and theoreticians mentioned by Davis J. Gunkel we live today in digital culture of “mash-up”, which is at the same time configurable convergence culture. Therefore in the contemporary world the concept of remix enjoys such great popularity. It is in sampling and remixing that “the cultural logic of networked global capitalism” should be sought. However, the mentioned terms occur mainly in the disputes over copyright laws and freedom of the access to culture. For Gunkel this aspect is not a key one. In Of Remixology he suggests a departure from the current way of thinking about remix in terms of an original and a copy, innovation and derivation, authorship and plagiarism. Instead, Gunkel proposes the third way of thinking, where his companions become such theoreticians as Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard and Slavoj Žižek.

The article is an attempt to discuss Małgorzata Wojcik and Rafał Żak’s book Cisza and place it in a wider context. The analysis of this work, dealing with different faces and meanings of silence, becomes a point of departure for a wide-ranging story about the significance of silence in the 20th century art, as well as about the necessity of posthumanist perception of silence. The key context for the proposed argument is John Cage’s piece 4,33’’ and the reflections accompanying the American composer during his creation of the work. The latter ones are essential not only for the author of this article but they also constitute a leading motif of the analysed book.

The paper is an attempt at tracing the relations between the title categories of Kobieta – Historia – Literatura [Woman – History – Literature]. While concentrating on female writing, the researcher finds there the issues which have not been yet analysed, for example the feminist perspective of Wisława Szymborska’s poetry in her understanding of history; the question of identity, sexuality, corporality in the texts of postwar and contemporary female immigrant writers; politics of gender roles and stereotypes in (literary and non-literary) descriptions of Holocaust; and finally, the spatial determination of the female writers’ (Pola Gojawiczyńska) narratives about the history of postwar Warsaw. However, the most significant purpose of this article is to present diverse literary contexts which make it possible to tell “grand history”/“grand narrative” with the use of various strategies of narration created by women or placing a female figure (”feminity”) inside it.

The following analysis of Katarzyna Czechot’s book Ofelizm. Romantyczne zawłaszczenia, feministyczne interwencje [Ophelism. Romantic appropriations, feminist interventions], published in 2016, is a chronological record of ophelic images proposed by this gender studies researcher. The aim of the paper is to demonstrate Czeczot’s dialogue with the traditional representations of Shakespeare’s tragic female figure. In the review the author pays attention to the subversive potential of the subsequent chapters of the work. The portrayals of a female, and sometimes feminized, body, which are linked together by an “ophelic code”, are often interpreted as a certain kind of medium of social revolutions, of changes in human expectations and desires.

The author provides reflections upon the influence of postmodern literary tendencies on a fable. Contemporary metamorphoses of a fable are characterised by an attempt at deconstructing the genre, connected with various strategies of intertextual play with literary tradition (autoreflection, metaliterature, metatextuality, intertextuality, astiche, collage, parody etc.). This process is demonstrated on the example of the chosen postmodern fables written by Grzegorz Kasdepke, Marta Guśniowska, Agnieszka Suchowierska.

The subject of the following rhetorical analysis is Józef Piłsudski’s speech entitled Przemówienie na bankiecie z okazji wprowadzenia orderu “Virtuti Militari” [Speech Delivered on the Banquet of Introducing The Order of “Virtuti Militari”], made on 22.01.1920 at the first meeting of the Chapter of the Order. Piłsudski’s speech at the burial of Słowacki’s remains in the crypt at Wawel Cathedral was “a masterpiece of the art of oratorical art.” The same level of mastery can be grated to the speech delivered at the first meeting of the Chapter of “Virtuti Militari”. It is not only Piłsudski, as an author, that links the two speeches, but also the fact that both of them were delivered at important historical moments: the first one is the speech of the creator of the independent Republic of Poland, the latter – a speech of the creator of the independent Republic of Poland, who rescued the Polish state by carrying out May Coup. Still, what is the most important in rhetorical interpretation is the same outstanding ars verbis that linked them, highlighting the relativity of the opposition poetry-prose.

A Report from conference 'The Gender of Avant-Gard' (University of Silesia in Katowice, October 2017).

A Report from the Conference 'Old Polish Literature. Reading Texts, History and Culture' (October 2017).

A Report from the Conference 'Marginalia, Commentaries, and Footnotes in Old and Modern Books' ( October 2017).

Natalia Malek undertakes a task of finding a possibility of translation between the languages of prosaic/poetic and visual arts, thus struggling to widen the spectrum of artistic expression. Her actions aim to intensify the form of the poem, which results in her leaning towards daring minimalism. Malek’s poems have gone a long way from life images with an ordered plot to concise linguistic images which strive towards deeper meanings and open up questions about identity and the art of poetry.

The article is an attempt at providing an interpretation of Natalia Malek’s work Kord in the context of sculpture and materiality. Starting from outlining a definition of a sculpture as a situation and a meeting, the author tries to demonstrate how a poetical language stages the sculptural, departing from the tradition of concrete poetry in favour of openness and potentiality of a poem. The essential contexts for the following argument are both elements of the study of objects and the feminist approach to corporality, which stimulate thinking in terms of the matter and materiality and enable us to interpret Malek’s project as addressing dualisms of Western metaphysics, as well as calling for a different type of reading. The category of “material vision” (de Man) is for the author of the article a point of departure, however, in result, it turns out to be insufficient and gives way to the project of reading understood as a “sculptural situation”.