Iwona Boruszkowska

During his stay in the US, Joseph Brodsky met Susan Sontag, an American essayist, one of the most influential intellectuals. In 1976, they became friends. This paper analyzes their long friendship, focusing on Brodsky’s image recorded in Sontag’s diary and in her essays. It is an attempt to reconstruct a portrait of the Russian poet on the basis of the American essayist's writings.

Artykuł omawia dwa literackie przykłady reprezentacji epidemii: libretto młodopolskiego pisarza i krytyka Karola Irzykowskiego Zaraza w Bergamo (1897) oraz utwór przedstawiciela polskiego futuryzmu – Brunona Jasieńskiego Palę Paryż (1928), które ukazują tendencje do pesymistycznego ujmowania rzeczywistości poprzez metaforę zarazy. Autorka wskazuje, iż zainteresowanie twórców chorobą i epidemią jako tematem literackim powraca w momentach przełomów i kryzysów. Narracje o zarazie, pladze czy innym powszechnym zagrożeniu będą w literaturze modernistycznej i międzywojennej reprezentowały właśnie narracje katastroficzne. Twórczość polskich modernistów i awangardzistów ujmuje bowiem całe spektrum katastroficznych tematów, nawet jeśli katastrofę zawęzić do plagi: morowa zaraza, zadżumione miasta i szalejące śmiertelne grypy goszczą na kartach literatury XIX i XX wieku. 

In the book Depression: A Public Feeling Ann Cvetkovich uses her own memoir of depression as a research material and organizes around it some scientific ideas presented in a critical essay. Cvetkovich’s voice on the matter of depression, whose task was to (re-)introduce private feelings into the public sphere, can be read as an autopathographic analysis of the illness discourse. However, the critical task of her writing is to depathologize depression (to stop describing it as bad or unproductive) and emphasize that it can be valuable in society as a cause of change. Cvetkovich describes and analyzes her own affective and somatic experiences of depression from the very beginning of her academic career. In this article I analyze Cvetkovich’s book as an interesting affective fusion of the depression journal and speculative (critical) essay. The aim of the article is also to point to the link between late capitalism and depression, especially in the sphere of social moods, made by Lauren Berlant and Ann Cvetkovich.

Symphony of sadness - Olha Kobylianska’s novella Valse Mélancolique

The article is a proposition of interpretation Valse Mélancolique – short stories written by the  Ukrainian women writer Olha Kobylianska (1863–1942). This is an example of literary research devoted to synthetic overview of the phenomenon of insanity / mental illness in Ukrainian

Modernism literature (late nineteenth and early twentieth century). Insanity, being one of the main themes of modernist literature, today does not live to see a proper discussion in the Ukrainian literary studies. The resulting so far work has moved this issue only into a selective and fragmentary way, always on the margins of the main range of research interests, thus far definitely without exhausting problem. Madness constituted for Kobylianska one of the most important and dramatic forms of exclusion, hence the belief that the mentally ill is not so much a sick man, as enslaved, subjected to the pressure of power, deprived of the right to subjectivity, of their own forms of existence. 

Transitional Theory: The Relativity of Ukrainian Culture

The article summarizes Tamara Hundorowa’s book Tranzytna kultura. Symptomy postkolonialnoji trawmy: statti ta eseji published in Kyjiw in 2013 and discusses some crucial aspects of the original cultural theory developed there.

Ukrainian Transmodernity or the Dissonance between the European and Ukrainian Modernist Canons

This article is an attempt to give a synthetic overview of the phenomenon of modernity in the Ukrainian literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It considers the problem of the Europeanization of Ukrainian culture and presents different views of researchers on the phenomenon of modernism.