This article is a translation of the first chapter of George Bornstein’s book entitled Material Modernism. The Politics of the Page (2001). The first, theoretical section of the article discusses the notion of the “bibliographic code” (all material aspects of the text) as offering important supplements to the “linguistic code” (the words of the text). The article offers analogies to Walter Benjamin’s notion of the “aura” and to the concept of the “utterance,” coined by the speech-act theorists. Just as Benjamin argues that the “aura” locates the work of art in time and space and the speech-act theorists contend that the “utterance” (gesture, tone etc.) functions as an important carrier of meaning, so the author sees the “bibliographic code” as an important constituent of meaning. The remaining part of the article presents exemplary readings of four sonnets, written by John Keats, Emma Lazarus, William Butler Yeats and Gwendolyn Brooks.

The article’s purpose is to present Aleksander Wat’s essay written after his stay in Kaiser Hospital in Oakland in 1964, kept in the writer’s archive in the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library in New Haven. This essay seems to be relevant for several reasons: it is a commentary to Wat’s Dziennik bez samogłosek [DiaryWithoutVowels] and, above all, it is one of the poet’s pathographic texts devoted almost entirely to an analysis of the hospital space. Using the categories of heterotopia, total institution, and infirmary, an attempt is made to describe the phenomenon of an “autobiography of the state of imprisonment” (the notes from Kaiser Hospital are treated as part of a never-written memoir My Prisons – My Hospitals) and reconstruct the poetics of a heterotopical text created from the perspective of an inhabitant of the “counter-site.”

The article draws our attention to the so-called “born digital dossier génétique,” focusing on the specific aspects of its materiality. The born-digital record consists of digital objects, temporary files, metadata and fragmented traces of the writing process, which are scattered across multiple system locations and might be recoverable from the unallocated space of the data carrier. When the researcher analyzes a digital dossier génétique, he or she reads the writing process through the digital traces of the algorithmic processing on a specific historical system with specific forensically salient features. The forensic features to look at are historically specific for the archived system in question and need specific tools and media-archaeological knowledge to be interpreted adequately. In conclusion, the author argues that the forensic materiality of the born digital record poses important and attractive challenges to both scholarly editing and genetic criticism.

The article deals with the question of genetic criticism and forms of archiving contemporary playwriting and, in particular, with the necessity to redesign these archives in a dynamic and reticular way. At first, we recall the uses of genetic criticism in drama studies in order to talk about “playwriting practices.” Additionally, we question the institutional places of archiving contemporary playwriting. Finally and above all, we develop a reflection on online auto-archiving by contemporary playwrights to see how far their new uses of writing with the help of computers and Internet research questions the genetic criticism and invites us to talk about a reticular and rhizomatic model in writing processes.

The purpose of this essay is to read, describe and evaluate, from the critical metaperspective, the ideas and concepts contained in the work Génétique des textes by Pierre-Marc de Biasi.

The article is a critical analysis of a collection of unpublished texts by Rafał Wojaczek entitled Nie te czasy. Utwory nieznane [Not These Times. Unknown Poems]. In the first part of the paper, the author places the book within a broader context, revealing the specific nature of its reception. He regards the analyzed volume as an element of an ongoing process of complementing the overall work of the Wroclavian artist that began a few years ago. In the second part, the author focuses on the editing of selected poems. An in-depth comparative analysis of published versions and archival records makes it possible to detect numerous editorial mistakes made during the preparation of the volume, concerning both the question of the correct reading of the autographs and typescripts, and the reconstruction of the creative process necessary for understanding the available archival material. The author of the paper puts forward a claim that this supplementation of the poet’s canon is dangerous, for it distorts not only the poetic oeuvre of Rafał Wojaczek, but also the contents of the archive itself. The scarce editorial commentary justifying the final shape of the poems on the basis of the adopted criteria of evaluating the archival records cannot efficiently replace the sophisticated critical apparatus obligatory in such cases, and it turns out to be not only insufficient, but also contrary to the facts.