Arleta Galant

In the article, the author presents certain issues concerning autobiographical archival practices of Kazimiera Iłłakowiczówna. The basis and inspiration to discuss these practices is Iłłakowiczówna’s Paper. The Archive as Research Object, a monograph by Lucyna Marzec. In the first part of the essay, the author describes problems associated with a strictly relational character of the archival processing of the poet’s legacy. The creation rules of biographical narrative and the question of agency are among the main themes in the second part of the article. In the last part, the author discusses the importance of a bricolage in the workshop of an archive researcher.

The article presents remarks on the book by Błażej Warkocki Pamiętnik afektów z okresu dojrzewania. Gombrowicz – queer – Sedgwick [Memoirs of Aff ects from Adolescence: Gombrowicz – Queer – Sedgwick]. It reconstructs the most important methodological and thematic patterns of interpretation proposed in the discussed monograph. These patterns, presented by Błażej Warkocki from the perspective of the queer reading of Freud’s psychoanalysis, the concept of “paranoid gothic” by Sedgwick and Gombrowicz’s subversions of heteronormative masculinity, outline a research horizon absent from Gombrowicz studies. Homophobia remains one of the most important issues within this new research horizon.

In her article the authoress outlines the issues concerning the relation between feminism, literary criticism and modern literature. She poses some questions concerning the prose oeuvre of contemporary Polish women authors as well as the social contexts and aesthetic strategies associated with it. What proved to be important here were also issues allowing reflection on the change of literary-critical and historical and literary discourses inspired by feminist thought, as well as issues allowing to record the losses and gains resulting from the entanglement of feminist literary criticism in mass communication and the results of the „cultural turnaround” of feminist literary studies.

The basis of the contemplations contained in the article is a book by Monica Świerkosz titled In the space of tradition. Prose of Izabela Filipiak and Olga Tokarczuk in disputes about literature, canon and feminism. The author of the sketch outlines the threads on the feminist discourse about the past, which remain the key to the book’s analyses and reconstructs the importance of nomadic methodological project, which by criticising the concept of feminine continuum enables the expansion of languages to interpret “text genealogy” of contemporary Polish female writers.