The point of departure of the article is an analysis of medical discourse of the end of 19th century, which was concentrated on the symptoms of neurasthenia – a disease of men who were considered victims of civilisation, in contrast to women’s hysteria, regarded as their bodily affliction. The author notes a special status of this discourse which transcends the borders of medicine and diagnoses the whole social field: it becomes entangled in the relationships between sexes and genders, in class, ethnical and national stratification; expresses the traits of capitalism, democracy and its requirements, thus becoming a means of conveying contemporary ideas and phantasms concerning sexuality and its relation with subjectivity. The phantasmic projections of “endangered” masculinity, lined with panic and fear, constitute the main objects of reconstruction and interpretation.

The article is devoted to the issue of homosociety. The term became popularized by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in her book Between Men. English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985). It refers to all the relationships between men who support one another’s strivings and interests, and who at the same time constitute a group grounded on the discrimination of women and homosexuals. This phenomenon is based for example on the “trade of women”: men exchange women, thus creating patriarchal and patrilineal relations. The issue has been extensively analysed by a great number of researchers (e.g. Luce Irigaray, Adrienne Rich, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, and in Poland: Maria Janion, Błażej Warkocki, Tomasz Basiuk or Jacek Kochanowski). The work is also worth noting is The Role of Eroticism in Male Society (Die Rolle der Erotik in der männlichen Gesellschaft) by Hans Blüher, who viewed male bonding (homosocial and homosexual) as the key to building and developing society.

The article proposes an “anal” reading of Witold Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke from the perspective of the so‑called “anal turn” in the research on masculinities within the field of queer theories. The author presents an overview of theoretical perspectives, in which anality has been recognized as a suppressed component of male identity (e.g. Freud, Bataille, Kristeva, Deleuze and Guattari, Hocquenghem, Laporte). Masculinity seen from this angle is based on a radical shift of the foundation from a phallogocentric position to a more dispersed, non‑centralist, and thus more difficult to grasp, “anal” approach. In Gombrowicz’s work this change is best illustrated in the reflections on the subject of privacy. The subjectivity of the main character of Ferdydurke organises himself not around phallus but anus, and this new, radically shifted and dispersed subjectivity is called by Gombrowicz the private (or “upupiona”, “pampered”)
masculinity, which reactivates the suppressed anality. The author analyses Ferdydurke also in the context of a peculiarly understood theory of “anal work,” in the light of which a literary work appears as an excrement and writing as excretion.

The article is an attempt at providing description of the functioning and transformations of masculinity in culture, and above all in literature after 1945. While
employing theoretical languages of R.W. Connell and K. Silverman, well‑rooted in the tradition of masculinity studies, the author strives to reconstruct its dynamics, which is shaped by tension between two categories: hegemony (as the required position of masculinity ensured by military experience) and trauma (as a real and long‑term result of this experience). The tension between the cultural discipline of hegemony and the increasing awareness of trauma shapes other oppositions, which makes it possible to model the historical course of the transformations of masculinity and leads to the creation of postmodern, demilitarized and “depatriarchalised” male habitus. One of their distinguishing features is reevaluation of the previously neglected spheres of male experience, such as fatherhood.

The author of the article analyses the transformations of the category of masculinity in social realist literature. For Stalinism a negative point of reference in the fight over a new model of masculinity was war and an image of young, brave soldiers of the Home Army, associated with the tradition of the Second Polish Republic. The attempts were made to juxtapose this model with a new type of masculinity founded on the idea of physical work on the reconstruction of the country, an image of a heroic soldier of the Red Army and the Secret Police functionaries. In the 1960s and 1970s the authors of militia fiction and the works belonging to the so‑called military patriotism referred to this Stalinist concept of masculinity.

In his article the author sketches a portrait of Geralt of Rivia, a title character of Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher series aw well as a video game The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, while at the same time tracing the work of deconstruction inscribed in the figure of the hero. Most significantly, it is Geralt’s gender identity that becomes subject to deconstruction; a model of heroic, fatherly, withdrawn masculinity becomes subverted and unseamed – on the one hand by female corporality; on the other, by female politics – which results in questioning and rejecting the so far dominant model in favour of subjectivity suspended between femininity and masculinity (and their other variants).

The article “Prosaic Aspects of Life. (Extra)ordinary Histories” is an attempt at describing the experience of fatherhood found in the poems of the authors from “bruLion” and “postbruLion” groups. While analyzing the social transformations which took place in Poland in the 1990s (e.g. the modifications of the system of social roles stereotypically assigned to each of the sexes, the change of paradigms of what has been commonly recognized as “male” and “female”, “the crisis of fatherhood,” extensively described by sociologists, etc.) and the transformations within lyric poetry itself (domination of personal lyric poetry, autobiographism, rejection of political and social obligations of literature in favour of the interest in privacy and concentration on the individual experience), the author asks about the literary attractiveness of the motif and analyses its various manifestations in the works of Marcin Świetlicki, Jacek Podsiadło, Robert Adamczak, Sławomir Matusz and Dariusz Suska.

Prose of the Polish contemporary writer Marta Syrwid.

An interview with the Polish contemporary writer Marta Syrwid.

The classic study of the German social anthropologist is discussed in the context of different trends in “masculinity studies”. The reviewer demonstrates that “male fantasies,” analysed by Theweleit, are not solely a historical phenomenon, but nowadays – in a slightly modified form – can urge young men to (often dangerous) actions. Moreover, Theweleit’s book is also worth reading because throughout almost the whole previous century the Polish variant of masculinity has been referring to the hegemonic German masculinity as its antithesis.

The title of Marek Troszyński’s book Słowacki. Poza kanonem is excellent from the perspective of marketing, but at the same time, it succeeds in conveying the
content of the 11 chapters of different length, supplemented with 8 interesting appendices and 65 aptly selected and described illustrations. In a way, it has a character of sylwa; its previous versions (published in refereed magazines and collective monographs) became considerably re‑edited in order to achieve the result in the form of monography. I accept the opening form of this dissertation, which is proposed by the author, as well as his affirmative attitude to the poet’s quasi‑literary achievements, which makes the author “a friendly witness” of Słowacki’s biography and writing. The work is undoubtedly original, own, exceptional and quite unique. I do not expect that in the foreseeable future we will encounter any gifted follower of the method, inquisitiveness, a highly interesting narration, and at the same time a lucky discoverer of so many philological findings, offering such a great number of the conjectures of the poems, not necessarily canonical ones, however, coming after the “canonical”, because critical, edition of Juliusz Kleiner. 

The texts included in the volume deal with the issues concerning the creation and circulation of literary works in the Polish People’s Republic. The elements of a literary career, such as recognition of an author, his or her descent or pro‑state activity, are the subject of study. The authors persuade that the social position of a writer did not always correspond with the artistic value of his or her work and that it is possible to reconstruct the transformations of the cultural politics in the Polish People’s Republic on the basis of the examination of the fate of the books handed in for evaluation to the office of censorship. The analysis of the specific careers proves the thesis that literature in the communist system could not be situated outside the cultural context and the external factors had a significant impact on the final form of the work.

The presented review concerns Krzysztof Siwczyk’s latest book of poetry. Jasnopis, published under the imprint of a5 publisher in 2016, refers to the subject matter that the poet has dealt with so far; however, clothing it a new, lighter, less complicated dress; following the current trends and at the same time resigning from all extravagance. The unpredictable world was closed in a quite predictable and tamed form. Yet, the present review focuses not only on the issues raised by the poems included in the volume, but also on the analysis of the poetic mechanisms employed by the author, the examination of the dialogue which Siwczyk establishes with other contemporary writers. Moreover, the reviewer attempts to situate the latest collection of the Silesian writer on the map of his previous poetic works.

In 1638 dramatic idyll a male view of marriage is undermined by the voice of these women (Dafnis appears here as pars pro toto) who critically perceived a marital status as a life determined by abandoning the virtue of chastity. In Scene 13 one can already recognize – at least on a verbal level – the equal rights: Peneus’s male arguments are juxtaposed with Dafnis’s female ones. The nymph – in a prefeminist way? – juxtaposes her female subjectivity with male objectification in favour of the values which for Apollo and Peneus can be imagined at most: love for a woman and the continuity of a family (exalted by being related to a god).

The presented interpretation of Andrzej Muszyński’s Podkrzywdzie constitutes an attempt at situating the work in the perspective of its references to some determinants of Bruno Schulz’s poet ics and his literary worldview, especially to the concept of mythologization of the represented world and the linguistic practices, referring to the consistent stylization which has its roots in the fiction of the author of The Cinnamon Shops. The proposed intertextual reading leads to the conclusion about the creative restitution of Schulz’s model, while at the same time enabling one to inscribe Muszyński’s novel debut, mythographic creation of Podkrzywdzie in the literary trend of “small homelands,” unex pectedly reviving in the second decade of the 21st century.

Sprawozdanie z seminarium naukowego 'Rozmowy z Diabłem' (Katowice 2015).

Report from the scientific conference 'Powroty historii' (Katowice 2016).

The paper “The Economics of Body: On Marta Syrwid’s Novels” aims, on the one hand, to sketch a portrait of the writer and place her within the space of the Polish literary field; on the other hand, it makes an attempt to interpret her first novel Zaplecze. The author of the text seek to break off with the dominant feminist existential perspective, in which Syrwid has been often inscribed by the critics. Instead, he proposes to view her writing as a continuation of the modern thinking (references are made to e.g. Kafka) about the subject in economic categories, that is as an impossible project of the complete breaking from and becoming independent of the outside reality.