"Polish Lusatia" – An Attempt at Literary Revitalization: On the Novels of Halina Barań

The article "Polish Lusatia" – An Attempt at Literary Revitalization: On the Novels of Halina Barań describes the collective memory and the regional identity field of the contemporary inhabitants of the area between Kwisa and Lusatian Neisse. „Polish Lusatia” is a borderland and polycentric area, therefore the author of the article takes into account it’s relationship with Polish and Sorbian national identification, "post-German" traces in the local landscape and regionally dominant (Lower) Silesia. From this perspective, he discusses Halina Barań's novels about Lusatia, analyzing the historiosophy and geopolitics of her fiction, as well as popular tropes used by the Bogatynia’s writer, including the "sack" (panhandle) and "tripoint" metaphors.

In Search of the Nietota Flower. „Fossil Literature” and Paleobotany

The article focuses on the issues of paleontology, the science of plant fossils, with particular emphasis on paleobotanical threads devoted to fossil vegetation, which in the 19th century was closely related to philology, represented both by the science of literature and language. The author extracts the notions of “fossil literature” (Adam Mickiewicz) and “fossil poetry” (Ralph Waldo Emerson), pointing to their particular relationship with “paleobotany of the unconscious” (Kazimierz Wyka), presented from the psychoanalytic perspective (Eduard von Hartmann, Carl Gustav Jung, Charles Baudouin) as an archetype of collective, interspecies memory, reaching back to some common ancestor and root cause reminding us of the eternal coexistence of the organic and the inorganic, plant and animal, human and non-human. The author also draws attention to the ecological and ecocritical aspects of the fossil literature, which he perceives as the trace fossils of human life activity (ichnofossils), which make up the meta-layer of the Anthropocene.

Topophrenia – Guilt – Enoengram. Zielona Góra as a “Hidden, Covered” Place

In the contemporary prose of Zielona Góra, which is focused on the experience of the post-war past of the city, the sense of place-consciousness is topophrenic. Topophrenia, a concept introduced by Robert Tally as a notion of affective geography, provides a compelling explanation of feeling of the disorder, anxiety and dis-ease that exist between locals and the post-German town, which turns out to be the “hidden, covered” place. The concept of topophrenia is used to describe the dynamic, recursive interactions between the affected and the place understood as a “guilty city.” The associations revealed in the semantic game illustrate the transposition of “feeling guilty” into “connected with wine” (in Polish the word “winny” has two meanings: “being guilty” and “connected with wine”). Hence, the key figure of the contemporary Zielona Góra prose is the enographic mnemotopos – it transmits precognitive experiences and acts as an enoengram, transferring the “hidden, covered” into symbolic imagination.

Why Does Regional Literature Need an Imaginarium of Horror? On Gothicizing Lower Silesia

The article focuses on the relationship between gothicism and regionalism in the literature of Lower Silesia. The author poses a question about the role of the imaginarium of horror in shaping the psychotopography of the region, in which real, spectral and affective topographies converge. An important context is the peripheralization of the region after the political transformation, which resulted in economic regression of Lower Silesia. Gothic regionalism is therefore interpreted as a reaction to social, economic and political processes taking place on a local and global scale, but perceived from a peripheral point of view. As a descriptive term, however, it allows to recognize several aspects: the key role of center-periphery relations, local-global interactions, the influence of late capitalism, the return of repressed events as the uncanny, the horror of everyday life and the exclusion of what exceeds the internal normativity of regional communities. Works of selected authors were analysed, e.g. Joanna Bator, Olga Tokarczuk, Henryk Waniek, Jakub Bielawski, Maciej Bobula.

The Region in Translation

The article consists of two parts. The first contains a summary and an interpretation of the project “New regionalism in literary studies,” initiated in 2012 by Małgorzata Mikołajczak and Elżbieta Rybicka, joined by researchers from, among others, Białystok, Olsztyn, Katowice and Wrocław. The author looks at both external reception, analyzing reviews of the publications that are the aftermath of the New Regionalist conferences, and internal one, i.e. self-diagnoses formulated by its participants. One of the conclusions is the postulate to strengthen interregional comparative studies, which can be helped by the use of tools developed in the field of translation studies, especially in its cultural variety. The second part is devoted to the Belarusian writer from Podlasie, Sokrat Janowicz, who treated translation as a way to overcome the particular determinants of his own work and Belarusian culture. 

Coalpolis – Metropolitan Relation of Cities and “Under-Grounds”

The article proposes the use of a new concept of coal city, which allows describing regions of hard coal mining and post-mining regions by taking into account both their geology as well as their mining and economic culture. Węglopolis (Coal City) is a perspective on literature and art, particularly useful in attempts to assess the past of coal regions and design their future. The author shows the correlation of coalpolises both with the available naming tradition (Górnośląsko-Zagłębiowska Metropolia, polis, megalopolis), as well as with research on the Carbocene, a specified variant of the Anthropocene, in which the role of hard coal in creating and destroying societies, the natural environment and culture is taken into account. 

Performing Białoszewski. On MiroFor v. 1 and 2

The article is a discussion on two volumes of the journal MiroFor. Its authors, experts in Białoszewski’s work, present new perspectives of research on the oeuvre of the creator of Memoir from the Warsaw Uprising. After the poet’s death, many unknown works – unpublished during his lifetime – were published, which shed new light on his oeuvre. In the light of the new sensitivity and new methodologies, Białoszewski’s work turns out to still be important, up-to-date and attractive to readers. Themes such as war trauma, homosexuality, autobiographism gain a new illumination. The volumes also present unknown transcripts of recordings and archival materials. This is valuable material for researchers and admirers of Białoszewski. Both volumes of MiroFor are presented as a valuable and inspiring invitation to a joint conversation about Miron Białoszewski’s work.

Towards Polysensory Perception in Literary Studies. On Aleksandra Kremer’s Book The Sound of Modern Polish Poetry. Performance and Recording after World War II

The article reviews of Aleksandra Kremer’s book The Sound of Modern Polish Poetry. Performance and Recording after World War II (2021), which is the first to describe and scrutinise the phenomenon related to the formation of the modern culture of poetry audio realisations in Poland during the second half of the twentieth century. This phenomenon relates to the growing interest of poets in authorial audio realisations of their poetry that crosses the boundaries of the text by harnessing new technologies to distribute, manipulate and reproduce sound. This review aims to situate the book in a context of studies on the relationship between literature and sound in the age of secondary orality and to present its potential influence on the discussion regarding the function of the latest literature in the contemporary audio-visual culture.