STRANGE IMAGES
The text presents a double interpretation (homoerotic and homophobic) of a commercial image of the “renaissance youth” set in the context of the 1980s and the twilight of Communist Poland. The subversive potential of homoerotic reading of the image, on which somewhere in the late 1980s someone wrote AIDS, is presented against the background of its history. The hand-made inscription is here interpreted not only as a homophobic act but first and foremost as an operation aiming at establishing the sense of the image in such a way so that the subversion founded on homoerotic reading is cancelled and the “renaissance youth” becomes a “sick faggot.” As a result of this operation, the image starts to create the only legitimate view of homosexuality, with connotations of sickness, very similar to images of AIDS that appeared in the homophobic public discourse of the Reagan era in the USA.

PHOTOHRAPHY, SHOCK AND WRATH: FRAMES OF WAR
Modern military conflicts seem to involve more and more ardently the tools of visual discourse. Machine-made pictures, as modern acheiropoeta, provide the mass spectatorship with countless images of wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, or the Balkans. However, the “war of images,” so often diagnosed by contemporary scholars of visual culture, seem to have an interesting feature, which so far has not been pronounced sufficiently enough in current discourse. Namely, the classical mode of pictorial representation of war concentrated predominantly on the Fronterlebnis: the First World War drawings or photographs showed soldiers in immediate combat; the contemporary mode of representation seems to prefer the pre- or post-combat situations: missiles before hitting the target, towns after the bombing etc. Therefore, the main position of the observer shifts from the one of the field soldier to the one of an observer, of a passive by-stander. Traditionally, this position was occupied by women and for that reason it is important to investigate their accounts of “looking at the war atrocities.” The article follows a discussion built up over the years by the books of Virginia Woolf (Three Guineas, 1936) and Susan Sontag (Regarding the Pain of Others, 2003), and a recent publication by Judith Butler (Frames of War, 2009).

A NEW TYPOLOGY OF THE AVANT-GARDE – AN OUTLINE
The article is an attempt at formulating a new typology of the avant-garde in its different modes of functioning. The starting point is the assumption that experimental art at the beginning of the twentieth century was first and foremost the answer to sociocultural changes and the resultant crisis of representation. Four types of attitude are proposed: the socio-affirmative one constitutes an apotheosis of the crisis, which becomes a springboard for the emergence of a new cultural era. Representatives of this stance believe in the possibility of creating entirely new means of expression or conventions and embrace the ideology of progress. The decadent type is a continuation of the Adornian aestheticism; it is characterized by melancholy and the awareness of the impossibility of overcoming the crisis, which often takes on a form of controlled chaos and tragic tomfoolery. The surrealist type tries to create an alternative reality for art, which would liberate it from its cognitive limitations. Finally, the aesthetic-religious type is characterized by the experience of past aesthetics, where the need for beauty is notoriously undermined by the awareness that the means of representation have worn out and the truth is hidden. It is often expressed by yearning after an ineffable sacred, which is not so much lost as eternally ungraspable, hidden and absent.kmiec

WHAT IS CHEKHOV’S SIREN WHISPERING TO US? ON THE UNAVOIDABILITY OF THE ‘IMPOSSIBLE’ CREATION OF THE HUMANITIES
The focus of my reflections on hermeneutics and the humanities is the short story or comic tale by Anton Chekhov entitled “The Siren” (1887) where we encounter two irreconcilable conceptions of representation; the story contains within it a philosophical aporia, but makes no attempt one way or another to resolve it. I believe that the non-metaphysical “adhesion” of this aporia is precisely its humour. Is such a humorous hermeneutics of uncertainty (of oneself) or such a comic approach to what we call the humanities, which is not sceptical because it to a certain extent a priori affirms the world as well as one’s own imperfection, at all possible? If I understand Chekhov correctly, then he confronts us with the problem of the uinavoidability of precisely this “impossible” creation of the humanities.

THE BELATED SENSUALITY AND NEW SENSIBILITY (ABOUT SUSAN SONTAG’S AGAINST INTERPRETATION AND OTHER ESSAYS)
The article discusses early essayistic writing of Susan Sontag, mainly the well-known and influential essays Against interpretation, On style, Notes on ‘Camp’, and One culture and new sensibility. The author looks at the evolution of Sontag’s aesthetic assumptions, especially at the way her initial praise of Modernism developed into categories of Post-modernism. Interestingly, all the time Sontag’s thought went along the lines of avant-garde thinking. The author also looks at the way Sontag’s aesthetic assumptions translated into her literary criticism on the basis of her essays and reviews about the French culture of 1950s and 1960s.

MY MARVELLINGS
Moje zdziwienia/My Marvellings/ is a column run by Henryk Markiewicz, retired Professor of the Jagiellonian University and one of the most outstanding Polish literary historians and theoreticians. In his essays, Professor Markiewicz presents and discusses various literary theory publications, comments on current events at the academia, argues with and questions authors of scholarly and popular articles, all the time being indefatigable in his insistence on respecting standards of academic professionalism, competence, honesty and responsibility for judgments and opinions expressed. This time Markiewicz focuses his critical attention on: Marek Piechota’s book about the work of Adam Mickiewicz, Lena Magnone’s article about Maria Konopnicka’s poem Rota, and Krzysztof Zajas’s article about theory of interpretation.