Subjectivity against the boundary experience in testimonies of muselmann survivors

This article is an attempt to present the issue of subjectivity in the testimonies of Muselmann survivors which were assembled in a medical study by Polish doctors Zdzisław Ryn and Stanisław Kłodziński. The Muselmann, who was a prisoner of concentration camps during World War II, exhibited extreme apathy as well as physical weakness and emaciation.
The testimonies of Muselmänner are analysed and compared with Giorgio Agamben’s philosophical thought of witness status. The main aim of the article is to supplement Agamben’s conception by proposing an additional view of Muselmänner’s subjectivity.

Temptations and risks of an ethical utopia

The article deals with the ethical turn in philosophy and literary theory. Special attention is paid to Richard Rorty’s conception of non-prescriptive ethics, which forms the basis for the vision of an ideal democratic society. This inspiring, comprehensive and controversial thought about a liberal, tolerant, just and diverse society, formed by literature and ethical reading, is reconstructed, analysed and discussed. The author claims that responsibility is an essential element of postmodernist ethics and shows three areas which it relates to: responsibility for the text, for the reader’s experience and for the reader’s identity. These three areas concern individual experience and private reading, but Rorty attempts to connect them with the public sphere and organization of a society. The author advances a thesis that this is not possible and that we cannot derive a tolerant and diverse democratic society from ethical reading without joining ethics with politics. In the work of the famous American pragmatist, contrary to the author’s thesis, the world where tolerance wins with prejudice is not the consequence of postmodern ethics and literature, but the effect of accepting the dictionary of neopragmatism.

Poetry after the end of the world: Andrzej Sosnowski’s Sylwetki i cienie

The article focuses on the attempt to write out the notion of the end of the world as inherent in Andrzej Sosnowski’s latest book of poems. The poet shows that apocalyptic narrations are a mythical discourse that brings down the complex process of man’s existence to a simplifi ed binary formula, reducing being in the world to a life – death dichotomy. The aim of poetry in such a reality is to shake the cliché-ridden language into greater evocative potential so as to enliven it. In Sylwetki i cienie, the function of poetry in late modernity enters the spotlight: notional binaries are broken apart, replaced by a nuanced space of linguistic game

In this paper, the author examines Czesław Miłosz’s poetic dialogue with Walt Whitman on the ambivalent status of the natural world and material existence. By translating Whitman’s poems and interspersing them among his own verses in the collection Unattainable Earth (Nieobjęta ziemia, 1984), Miłosz practices a peculiar form of poetic commentary or criticism, drawing attention to certain tensions within the work of his American predecessor. This tendentious form of dialogue between poets simultaneously intertwines with a conflict within Miłosz’s own poetics – as the Polish poet effectively argues with himself by proxy. The author plays close attention to Miłosz’s translation of Whitman’s “As I Ebb’d With the Ocean of Life,” pointing to several crucial distortions of its original meaning and context. This analysis opens the broader question of whether Miłosz’s poetry is truly hospitable to other voices or whether the dominant voice of the Miłoszean poetic subject inevitably subjugates or perverts them.

This essay aims to describe the difference between ‘barbarism’ and ‘anarchism’ in contemporary Polish poetry. Analysing the critical voices in the wake of a well-known essay by Karol Maliszewski, in which he coined the term ‘barbarism’ to refer to certain contemporary Polish poets, we come to the conclusion that the distinction between ‘civilised’ and ‘barbaric’ poetry after 1989 has been based solely on the literary personae of the various authors. Thus we claim that the generational shift between the poets of brulion and the younger ‘anarchist’ poets may be seen as leading to a certain new kind of persona, which is, at the same time, more coherent (due partly to their clear political statements) and more independent of the poem (due to their non-literary sociopolitical activities).

On the peripheries of the humanities, or, reading in the context of literary criticism and teaching of literature

The volume Doświadczenie lektury. Między krytyką literacką a dydaktyką literatury (The Experience of Reading. Between Literary Criticism and Teaching of Literature) edited by Anna Janus-Sitarz and Krzysztof Biedrzycki is an important book devoted to the question of reading as practiced by scholars, critics and teachers. The monograph contains views of historians of literature such as, for example, Anna Burzyńska, whose article opens the book, and others like Piotr Śliwiński, Wojciech Ligęza and Krzysztof Biedrzycki. Other essays focus on school as a place where books are read in an improper way. Zofi a Budrewicz, Anna Janus-Sitarz, Witold Bobiński, Leszek Jazownik, Jerzy Kaniewski write about the present situation of teenagers in the Polish system of education and their attitude to reading. Some texts are connected with two titular notions: ‘reading’ and ‘experience’. Their authors are: Barbara Myrdzik, Małgorzata Latoch-Zielińska, Anna Włodarczyk, Elżbieta Piątek, Anna Pilch, Krystyna Koziołek, Marta Rusek. The collection also contains articles presenting the issue of teaching (by Ewelina Strawa, Karolina Kwak, and Kordian Bakuła). The last part of the book is composed of essays interpreting the works of Czesław Miłosz (by Grażyna Tomaszewska), Gustave Flaubert (by Magdalena Marzec), Michał Witkowski and Dorota Masłowska (by Dorota Kozicka), Eugeniusz  Tkaczyszyn-Dycki (by Jarosław Fazan). The Experience of Reading. Between Literary Criticism and Teaching of Literature is a very modern and interesting project. It shows that the borders of these two disciplines are not far from each other.

Almost Kajzar

The article is a review of Marcin Kościelniak’s book on Helmut Kajzar’s drama and theatre. The monograph, although based on vast archival research, is meant as a highly subjective and selective guide through Kajzar’s oeuvre and as a portrait of an artist as a “cultural hermaphrodite”. The methodological tools chosen by Kościelniak – psychoanalysis, queer theory, poststructuralism – prove to be effective within the implemented mode of reading, although sometimes they become more important than Kajzar’s own work. Kościelniak wants to read Kajzar’s text from the cultural perspective but at the same time he neglects the local and historical context of his writing. Nevertheless, the book offers quite a persuasive and interesting picture of Kajzar’s drama and theatrical practice.

My Marvellings

Moje zdziwienia /My Marvellings/ is a column run by Henryk Markiewicz, retired Professor of the Jagiellonian University and one of the most outstanding Polish literary historians and theoreticians. In his essays, Professor Markiewicz presents and discusses various literary theory publications, comments on current events at the academia, argues with and questions authors of scholarly and popular articles, all the time being indefatigable in his insistence on respecting standards of academic professionalism, competence, honesty and responsibility for judgments and opinions expressed. This time Henryk Markiewicz focuses his critical attention on two articles: Ryszard Nycz’s W stronę humanistyki innowacyjnej: tekst jako laboratorium. Tradycje, hipotezy i propozycje (Toward Innovative Humanities: Text as a Laboratory. Traditions, Hypotheses, Ideas) published in “Teksty Drugie” (Second Texts) 2013, no. 1–2, and Magdalena Popiel’s Portret jako jednostka kulturowej teorii literatury (The Portrait as a Unit of the Cultural History of Literature) published in “Ruch Literacki” (“Literary Movement”) 2013, no 1.

A Reply to Professor Henryk Markiewicz

In my reply to Professor Markiewicz I focus on my belief in the necessity of considering literary history as an important part of contemporary culture. I am deeply convinced, that literary history, far from abandoning its professional standards, should join the processes created by this culture and respect a new kind of sensibility and expectations typical for its participans. The crucial aim in this situation is to consolidate the value of the literature itself.