Volume 13, Issue 1

2018

Publication date: 27.03.2018

Licence: CC BY-NC-ND

Editorial team

Secretary Dominika Kaniecka

Editor-in-Chief Celina Juda

Issue content

Symfonia smutku – Valse Mélancolique Olhy Kobylańskiej

Iwona Boruszkowska

Studia Litteraria Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis, Volume 13, Issue 1, 2018, pp. 1-13

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843933ST.18.001.8279

The article is a proposition of interpretation Valse Mélancolique – short stories written by the Ukrainian women writer Olha Kobylianska (1863–1942). This is an example of literary research devoted to synthetic overview of the phenomenon of insanity / mental illness in Ukrainian

Modernism literature (late nineteenth and early twentieth century). Insanity, being one of the main themes of modernist literature, today does not live to see a proper discussion in the Ukrainian literary studies. The resulting so far work has moved this issue only into a selective and fragmentary way, always on the margins of the main range of research interests, thus far definitely without exhausting problem. Madness constituted for Kobylianska one of the most important and dramatic forms of exclusion, hence the belief that the mentally ill is not so much a sick man, as enslaved, subjected to the pressure of power, deprived of the right to subjectivity, of their own forms of existence.

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La « laide vérité ». Le rêve de Cahus revisité

Joanna Gorecka-Kalita

Studia Litteraria Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis, Volume 13, Issue 1, 2018, pp. 15-24

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843933ST.18.002.8280

The aim of this paper is to propose an analysis of the Cahus’ Dream, a well known episode of the Perlesvaus, Arthurian romance from the 13th century, within the context of the medieval dream theories. Inspired mostly by Macrobius’ Commentary on the Dream of Scipio – focusing on the divinatory (or deceptive/ illusory) role of dreams – as well as by Tertullian’s and Augustine’s Christian reflections on the relations between the soul and the sleeping body, these theories permit to shed a new light on the oneiric adventure of the squire. In fact, the author furnishes numerous clues which make it look as an insomnium or fantasma: a false, illusory dream, deprived of any deeper signification. Thus, unable of uncovering some hidden, symbolic meaning, the mirage paradoxically turns out to be a material, “ugly”, as the text has it, truth, blurring the border between dream and reality in a most confusing way, and setting the specific Perlesvaus tone from the very beginning of the romance.

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The Desert Called America: Poetry of Boris Maruna and American Popular Culture

Ivica Matičević

Studia Litteraria Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis, Volume 13, Issue 1, 2018, pp. 25-39

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843933ST.18.003.8281

In the poetry of Boris Maruna (1940–2007), a Croatian modernist poet who is, together with Viktor Vida, considered the best Croatian emigrant poet, one can see the influences of American popular culture of the 1960s and 1970s. By living on three continents – Europe, South America, and North America – and having gained education in Los Angeles, Maruna incorporated into his poetic code some of the fundamental and typical determinants of American cultural and subcultural lifestyle. Fast food, television, film, rock/pop music, cars, freedom of sexual behavior… are some of the adopted forms of American culture that Maruna in his narrative poems both thematizes and advocates, but also questions in an extremely critical way. Irony, humor and strong satire represent the aesthetic aspects by which Maruna reveals the hypocritical, vain, and existential face of the United States of America of that period. On the other hand, like a distant Arcadia, there are landscapes and symbols of the homeland that he abandoned, and the desire to one day return into its physical spaces. However, even the so desired homeland cannot go without critical invectives and poetically ironic comments. Even then, Maruna’s liberal “unadjusted” consciousness makes itself heard, outside all the dictates of expected behavior, thus completely isolating him from the matrix of Croatian emigration poets.

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Pani Dalloway Virginii Woolf i jej postmodernistyczna i neomodernistyczna progenitura

Katarzyna Szeremeta

Studia Litteraria Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis, Volume 13, Issue 1, 2018, pp. 41-52

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843933ST.18.004.8282

The following paper is devoted to Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf’s seminal novel, and both implicit and explicit contemporary rewritings it inspired. It focuses mainly on the narrative, stylistic patterns and thematic concerns that so far have been discussed only fragmentarily and offers detailed overview of the originating texts in terms of features of Woolfian style that they deconstruct and construct anew. By pointing out the nature of intricate narrative, stylistic and thematic interdependencies between Mrs Dalloway and contemporary literary texts the hereby paper shows how these generically versatile texts amplify and recontextualize whole gamut of Woolfian concerns and which elements are subject to allusion, imitation or reinterpretation. The analyses conducted in this article lead to the conclusion that despite its complex narrative patterns, which may pose a challenge to a contemporary reader, Mrs Dalloway has inspired a proliferation of neo- and postmodern texts which imitate and reinterpret Woolfian narrative and stylistic patterns as well as suppressed notions of sexual identity, among other thematic concerns. Also, rewriting Mrs Dalloway within postmodern and neomodern paradigm, contemporary texts prove that modernist form did not become used, but continues to inspire both high and popular literature in the new spatial-temporal, cultural, and historical context.

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Komizm złożony w budowie światasurrealistycznego w „Jesieni w Pekinie” Borisa Viana

Tomasz Wojewoda

Studia Litteraria Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis, Volume 13, Issue 1, 2018, pp. 53-63

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843933ST.18.005.8283

The objective of present article is to draw attention on important role of comical element in creating surrealistic world, present in the prose of Boris Vian (1920-1959) – one of the most original French writers in the twentieth century. As a exemplificative material the author used Autumn in Peking, one of the most famous and most representatives Vian’s novels. Employing the classification proposed by Polish aesthetician Bohdan Dziemidok (elementary comism vs. complex comism), the author, placing himself in the hermeneutical spirit, analyses the novel’s narration in order to find various elements of complex comism, revolving around these comical elements, which are the result either of the novel’s composition or of diegesis’ construction. The present analyse is preceded by a short historical-literary reflexion which objective is to present a rich literary production of Boris Vian in the large context of times during which he used to write. Vian was indeed a writer whose literary idiom was influenced by various philosophical movements of those days – surrealism, nihilism, existentialism. A significant element of the article is the hypothesis according to which Boris Vian can be numbered among the artists using in his writing the bricolage technique – the concept proposed in different context by Claude Lévi-Strauss in his work entitled The Savage Mind (1962).

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L'Opéra au service de la Nation. La relecture rhétorique de la Guerre de l'Opéra de Jacques Cazotte.

Sebastian Zacharow

Studia Litteraria Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis, Volume 13, Issue 1, 2018, pp. 65-76

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843933ST.18.006.8284

The premiere of Serva Padrona by Pergolese at the Paris Opera divided deeply the French society of the Age of Enlightenment. The famous Querelle des Bouffons has become the nucleus of a lively debate, from which, what is to be emphasized, none of the sides was triumphant. In his treatise Guerre de l’Opéra, Jacques Cazotte, emphasizing his impartiality, stands in defense of French music.

By proving the superiority of Mondonville’s works, Cazotte is aware that only strong arguments can convince the philosophers. Accused by many of being “scientific” and in consequence, being incapable of expressing all the nuances of human passions, the French music, thanks to the ability to perform rhetorical functions, reserved, as it may seemingly appear, for forewords and literature, can not only conform to the rules, but also can please and touch. The French Opera, as Cazotte poves, fills perfectly the rhetorical target of persuasio with an intelligent and effective rhetoric and expresses the spirit and sensitivity of France.

The purpose of this article is to reflect on how Cazotte defends French music from the fashion for Italian music, which had a strong influence on the French aesthetics of the Age of Enlightenment, as well as from the philosophers of the epoch who would discredit at all costs the work of French composers in the eyes of the audience.

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Spis treści UNKOWN

Słowa kluczowe: Olha Kobylianska, melancholia, sadness, music, Arthurian romance, Perlesvaus (Le Haut Livre du Graal), dream turning real, nightmare, phantasm, medieval dream theories, Macrobius, Augustine, divination, modern Croatian poetry, popular culture, irony, Croatian emigrant poetry, sexual liberalism, Mrs Dalloway, postmodern progeny, neomodern progeny, rewritings, imitation, allusion, Vian, Autumn in Peking, complex comism, surrealism, bricolage, Jacques Cazotte, French Opera, French Enlightenment, rhetoric

Volume 13, Issue 1

2018 Next

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2018