When We Dead Awaken – Henryk Ibsen’s Dramatic Epilog

The author interprets Henryk Ibsen’s last drama, which is an epilogue of a series of plays started with the A Doll’s House, which did not enjoy much interest of contemporary readers and later researchers. The precise composition of the play, the revealed encounters of realistic and symbolic space, the alienation of reality and its phantasmic shape, and the ontologically uncertain status of the protagonists are analysed. The article demonstrates how Ibsen’s work on an artist proves to carry aporetic meanings, indicating that the most important obligation of man is to experience his own life, especially love wholeheartedly, but at the same time stating that only a suppressed libido can be a source of art. An attempt to solve this unresolvable contradiction is the vision of the resurrection, the central axis of the drama, which acquires aesthetic, existential, and eschatological significance

Abstract

Autorka poddaje interpretacji ostatni dramat Henryka Ibsena, będący epilogiem serii utworów rozpoczętych Domem lalki, który nie cieszył się większym zainteresowaniem współczesnych czytelników, a później badaczy. Analizowana jest precyzyjna konstrukcja dramatu, ujawniane interakcje między przestrzenią realistyczną i symboliczną, wyobcowanie rzeczywistości i jej fantazmatyczna postać oraz niepewny ontologicznie status postaci. Badaczka pokazuje, jak poświęcony artyście utwór Ibsena staje się nośnikiem aporetycznych sensów, wskazując na to, że najważniejszą powinnością człowieka jest pełne przeżywanie własnego życia, zwłaszcza miłości, ale zarazem konstatując, że tylko wytłumione libido może być źródłem twórczości. Próbą rozwiązania owej niemożliwej do rozstrzygnięcia sprzeczności staje się wizja zmartwychwstania, główna oś dramatu, która nabiera estetycznych, egzystencjalnych, oraz eschatologicznych znaczeń.

One More Thought (After Eighty Years) on Three Winters (Trzy zimy)

In the current research considerations devoted to the early work of Czesław Miłosz, the importance of his second poetic collection, Trzy zimy (in English: Three Winters), has been repeatedly emphasized. However, there was no analysis that would focus on attempts to define more precisely the meaning of Trzy zimy in the context of development processes within Polish literary modernism.The article is an interpretative approach concentrating not on individual poems, but on the whole creative intention of Milosz from 1936. This volume, seen as an ingeniously composed whole, and read in confrontation with the author's programmatic statements, presents itself as an important caesura closing the stage of early modernist Polish poetry, benefiting from various aesthetic inspirations and producing a somewhat modified version of "pure poetry" compared to the proposals of Western literature

The Revolution as a Biopolitical Necessity in Bruno Jasieński’s Works

One of the main concerns of Bruno Jasieński’s works is the role of the flesh and the violence against it. For Jasieński, the phantasm of revolution is intertwined with physiology, especially with hunger and glut. The dialectical materialism is overshadowed by biological necessity. The violence that necessity brings is presented as abstract arithmetics or as something that concerns the flesh and not the person. Jasieński divides the society into the suffering from unjust violence hungry masses (the proletariat), and the overfed (the aristocracy, the clergy and the bourgeoisie). The latter are shown as a not entirely human group against which the proposed acts of violence are legitimate. The concepts established decades after Jasieński’s death make it possible to analyze his works as a biopolitical project. The key terms in that analysis are bios, dzoe, and homines sacri (people, who can be killed without a murder being committed).

The Absence of Miłobędzka

This article considers the critical reception of poetic work of Krystyna Miłobędzka, the way it was performed till the beginning of 1990’s. The literary criticism in Poland was largely determined by then by the discourse of the academic literary studies. Furthermore – the most prominent voice in the poetical and critical dialog with Miłobędzka – Tymoteusz Karpowicz being the neoavantgarde poet himself – carried out the reading that was depending on his philosophical reading of Heideggerian phenomenology. Certain pattern of understanding Miłobędzka’s work, created at large by Karpowicz’s text Metafora otwarta (An Open Metaphor) seems to be neglecting certain thesis posited by Miłobędzka herself as an author of many meta-poetical statements, that could be read as the late avantgarde manifesto of her own.    

Touching the Light… On the Touch in Zbigniew Herbert’s First Volume of Poetry

The purpose of this research is to show the transition from sense of sight to the sense of touch, which happens in the first Zbigniew Herbert’s poetic volume titled String of light, to show the complexity of their connection, the intensity of the haptic experience and it’s poetical functions. By using the archeology of terms (Greek, Hebrew, Latin) – which shows connections between studied issues and the texts which underlie the European culture – outlining the philosophical context and the modern cultural anthropology’s view, the multidimensionality of Herbert’s work is outlined and his innovative effort to find the basis for existence in reality marked by disintegration of human and experience is shown.

Poetic Politicality? Some Remarks on Versification as a Form of Communication in Left-Wing Poetry

This text presents some reflections on the the prosodic nature (versification) of the poems written by the young polish poets and poetess representing left-winged politically engaged poetry movement  (Góra, Kopyt, Pietrek, Zydel, Freiheit and others) presented in the context of the debate on the importance of poetic form  “Forms of Engagement”, which took place in 2016. By contrasting two different modes of writing an understanding the (so called) poetics function, it shows two entirely odd approaches to applicate the art of verse for a political purposes in the young polish literature.

The Prolonged Life of Post-Secularism: On the Possible Ways of Reading Postcolonial Fiction

The article’s main aim is to find out whether it is possible to employ the categories and notions of postsecular thinking while discussing the field of postcolonial fiction, both in terms of theoretical compatibility and practical usage for the purposes of literary analysis. The point of departure for the author’s investigation is thus a question of the critical potential of such terms as secularity, religiosity, secularism and postsecularism, terms which have distinctly European roots, with reference to the culturally alien, non-Western communities whose paths have been to a considerable extent charted by European imperialism. Can these notions be applied to other historical and social realities, bearing in mind that they are intimately interwoven with the history of the European continent, stemming from the divorce of institutional religion from state authority and the familiar narrative of secularized modernity? To examine the issue, together with other dilemmas arising in the interaction of cultures which have been developing under the direct influence of Enlightenment with postcolonial societies, the author first scrutinizes a particular work of fiction, Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, pointing out that the consideration of its postsecular elements is vital in understanding the complex situation of the postcolonial country it depicts. The author then proceeds to tackle the question of the reception of postsecularism in the field of postcolonial studies as the domain of avowedly secular criticism and methodology.

A Postcards from the Apocalypse: On Language (and) Memory in Jonathan Safran Foer’s and Piotr Paziński’s Debut Novels

The main purpose of this article is to highlight and compare the issues of postmemory, language and space presented in two novels published at the beginning of the 21st century: Piotr Paziński’s Pensjonat and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated. The analysis and interpretation of the novels provide insight into the complex nature of Jewish identity and demonstrates the importance of translation in polyphonic, multilingual testimonies.

Some More Thoughts on Künstlerroman: The German Approach (with a Few Excursions)

This paper deals with the problem of using of the German term Künstlerroman (meaning artist-novel) in the German and Polish literary studies. It describes and comments some analytical contexts and contemporary approaches, focusing on the encyclopedic and lexical sources. The conclusion is, that the term Künstlerroman still has not been defined perfectly and needs further exploring, especially in the light of the category gender and contemporary narrative theories.

Night and Day Stories: the Holocaust Experience in the Polish Province

The article is a review of the book Dalej jest noc. Losy Żydów w wybranych powiatach okupowanej Polski [Beyond is the Night – the Fate of Jews in Selected Local Government Districts in Occupied Poland]. This two-volume work, edited by Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski, has been published by the Centre for Holocaust Research IFIS PAN. It is a summary of a research project that concerns survival strategies of Jews during the Occupation in the General Government (1942-1945). The authors attempt to describe nine different poviats through the prism of microhistory, focusing on the course of events during the Holocaust, German policies at the time, Polish-Jewish, Polish-Polish and Ukranian-Jewish relations.