The article presents chosen 16th and 17th-century Old Polish parenetic texts about personal examples to follow for people from the courtly circle and for the women. The parenetic content of these texts are analysed in the article considering the occurrence of ideas similar to Plato’s concept of virtues (aretai) – wisdom, bravery, temperance and justice, known later in Christian tradition as cardinal virtues. Their universality makes them a good basis to describe characteristics of the majority of personal examples. In the first part of the article the author outlines the historic and literary background of creating parenetic texts in the European culture since the ancient times to the 17th century. In the second part four Old Polish texts written by: Łukasz Górnicki, Stanisław Herakliusz Lubomirski, Jan Kocha­nowski and Erazm Otwinowski, describing personal examples of a courtier and a woman are analysed. In each of the texts the author is looking for ideas similar to Plato’s virtue concept and presents the characteristics of ideal courtier and woman.

 

In Herbert’s essays and poems we find not only a wide range of economic problems, but also a real passion with which the author describes the economic basics of all civilisations. In the apocrypha The Portrait in Black Frames and poem Hakeldama Herbert builds a great metaphor of The Last Judgement as the Great Books of accounts. Nothing unusual. The poet and essayist held a master’s degree in economics (he graduated from the School of Economics in Krakow – currently the University of Economics).

The African Books of Wojciech Jagielski change the perspective of writing about this continent. Following Ryszard Kapuściński, adopting his way of thinking about other cultures, he simultaneously proposes his own method of talking about Africa. On the one hand, Jagielski’s prose is an example of a new exotopy; on the other hand, the emphasis is not on exoticism: visiting and describing a place, the author wants his non-fiction not so much to carry an ethnographic tale as to show universal, all-human issues, all the more interesting, perhaps, because “extracted” from real biographies and events.

 

The article is devoted to ways of describing the consequences of 20th-century genocide. In his deliberations, the author touches upon the issue of gathering witnesses’ accounts of tragic events on a mass scale and on the resulting schematization and banalization of tales of mass death. He focuses upon the non-fiction of Jean Hatzfeld from Rwanda. Another issue is the question of the psychological, political and social effects of genocide, which last for many years after the tragic events. An important element are reflections on the description of the trauma of the Tutsi who survived the massacre of 1994 in the context of attempting to express such a kind of experience through literature.

 

The aim of the text is to show how the image of the radio (understood as both the radio receiver and the “radio in a radio”) has changed in the light of the latest audio dramas of the Polish Radio Theatre. In the plots of such dramas, the radio is a character, more or less actively taking part in the events. The image of the radio that emerges from the analyzed audio dramas is ambiguous and often negative, as a tool of propaganda, or one associated with the disintegration of society, death and hatred.

 

The article analises structural dependences between transplantology and canibalism and what this comparision can induce in our culture. If there are some dependeces between those two phenomenons, what it can cheange in our system of values. The last part of the article is analysing the exclusion of death in European culture. Because of this exclusion comarision of transplantology and canibalism is so cotroversial for us. That’s why the article tries to find a new ethical axis of the reception of transplatnation.