Anna Pekaniec

This paper, which is devoted to the poetic unveiling of Jadwiga Gamska-Lempicka,a forgotten female poet, translator, and editor of the interwar period, aims to evoke the character of her poetry. It is also an attempt at presenting her various texts. Closely influenced by the Young Poland movement, she was in constant dialogue with concepts taken from the Skamander Group or avant-garde poetics. However, since she used the prerogatives her education had given her, Gamska should be treated not only as a Young Poland epigone: as a doctor of letters, she was strongly aware that her poetry was a successful collage of poetic conceptions that were often starkly different from one other and tailored to her individual expression, discreetly but visibly breaking with concepts that had been taken from the poetry of Leopold Staff or Maryla Wolska. A closer look at the three volumes of Gamska’s poetry is also a significant attempt at filling one of the many gaps in the study of women’s lyrics published before the Second World War.

The present paper focuses on several significant issues connected with writing/reading journals. The author discusses journals, treated as an everyday practice based on obligatory narrativization of experience (as defined by Hannah Arendt), within the ethical horizon demarcated by the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur and Charles Taylor and the ideas of David Parker. Parker’s argument of immanent ethical nature of journaling is confronted with autobiographical theories developed by Philippe Lejeune, Małgorzata Czermińska, and Magdalena Marszałek. The discussion is supplemented by the indispensable component of gender. The narrative nature of journals becomes a starting point for changing the perspective used in the analysis of journals – from hermeneutic to constructivist, which also finds its reflection in how the subject is shaped in journal entries.

Agata Araszkiewicz’s book is a very interesting collection of possible ways of reading same novels from interwar period, novels written by women. By using tools mainly taken from feminist criticism such as écriture féminine or gynocriticism she builds interpretation of prose written by Aniela Gruszecka, Irena Krzywicka, Pola Gojawiczyńska, Wanda Melcer and Maria Kuncewiczowa. Araszkiewicz emphasizes it uniqueness, and by that she brings them back to history of polish literature. What is important to see, is that she focuses not only on poetics, but also on problems, themes, and, what is the most significant, on it’s aesthetic, what helps her to reveal revolutionary potential. Seen by Araszkiewicz, women’s novels from interwar period appeared not only as continuations of Young Poland poetic, but an innovative, multidimensional, autonomous space of literature with women’s signature.
 

By reaching out for a metaphor derived from the sphere of fi ne arts – “sepia sketch”, in her monumental biography of Zofia Nałkowska, Hanna Kirchner encompasses the life of the authoress of Granica within a delicate and unclear framework, though one which is drawn with a bold line. The impossibility of a direct transposition of one’s life into a written text, produced a shiny, multi-aspect “multi-portrait”. A few dozen chapters make up a fascinating story which though focused on a reconstruction of the authoress’s biogram, it transgresses considerably the task which is traditionally ascribed to biography.

The main of paper is to show Inga Iwasiów’s ways of understanding how women’s novels (mainly written after 1989) deal with categories such as: women’s writing, theoretical borders, politics of literature. Ideas are shown in both ways: as literary practice and critical concepts. Also under consideration was taken literature of personal document, what made panoramic map of women’s writing more diversified, and furthermore, made interesting proposals of interpretation and reading (both, critical and personal) exquisitely useful and efficient.