Iwona Boruszkowska

In the book Depression: A Public Feeling Ann Cvetkovich uses her own memoir of depression as a research material and organizes around it some scientific ideas presented in a critical essay. Cvetkovich’s voice on the matter of depression, whose task was to (re-)introduce private feelings into the public sphere, can be read as an autopathographic analysis of the illness discourse. However, the critical task of her writing is to depathologize depression (to stop describing it as bad or unproductive) and emphasize that it can be valuable in society as a cause of change. Cvetkovich describes and analyzes her own affective and somatic experiences of depression from the very beginning of her academic career. In this article I analyze Cvetkovich’s book as an interesting affective fusion of the depression journal and speculative (critical) essay. The aim of the article is also to point to the link between late capitalism and depression, especially in the sphere of social moods, made by Lauren Berlant and Ann Cvetkovich.

The present paper discusses two examples of literary depictions of epidemics: the libretto Zaraza w Bergamo (1897) by Young Poland writer and critic Karol Irzykowski and the novel Palę Paryż (1928) by Polish futurist author Bruno Jasieński, with both works exemplifying the trend to use the metaphor of pestilence to create a pessimistic image of reality. The author points out that interest in disease and epidemic as a literary subject often grows in the times of radical change and crises. The narratives of pestilence, plague or other collective threat in modernist and interwar literature were examples of apocalyptic narratives. The output of Polish modernist and avant-garde writers encompassed the entire spectrum of catastrophic themes, even if the range of disasters was limited only to plagues: the Black Death, cities ravaged by the bubonic plague, and raging epidemics of deathly flu strains frequently featured on the pages of literary works produced in the 19th and the 20th century.

During his stay in the US, Joseph Brodsky met Susan Sontag, an American essayist, one of the most influential intellectuals. In 1976, they became friends. This paper analyzes their long friendship, focusing on Brodsky’s image recorded in Sontag’s diary and in her essays. It is an attempt to reconstruct a portrait of the Russian poet on the basis of the American essayist's writings.

The article summarizes Tamara Hundorowa’s book Tranzytna kultura. Symptomy postkolonialnoji trawmy: statti ta eseji published in Kyjiw in 2013 and discusses some crucial aspects of the original cultural theory developed there.

This article is an attempt to give a synthetic overview of the phenomenon of modernity in the Ukrainian literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It considers the problem of the Europeanization of Ukrainian culture and presents different views of researchers on the phenomenon of modernism.