Issue 2 (68) 2026

Literaturoznawcze studia o niepełnosprawności. Polskie konteksty

2026

Publication date: 25.06.2026

Description

The publication of this volume was financed by the Jagiellonian University in Kraków – Faculty of Polish Studies.

Cover design: Maciej Godawa.

Licence: CC BY 4.0

Editorial team

Editor-in-Chief Monika Świerkosz

Executive Editor Tomasz Kunz

Issue Editor Monika Świerkosz

Issue content

Nie kończąc na niepełnosprawności

Monika Świerkosz

Wielogłos, Issue 2 (68) 2026, 2026, pp. 1-6

https://doi.org/10.4467/2084395XWI.26.011.23568

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Articles

Konstrukt niepełnosprawności rozproszonej w książkach dla dzieci

Agnieszka Kwiatkowska

Wielogłos, Issue 2 (68) 2026, 2026, pp. 7-26

https://doi.org/10.4467/2084395XWI.26.012.23569

This article examines various ways of depicting disability in contemporary Polish children’s literature. Its aim is to identify and describe the construct of diffuse disability as a new framework for perceiving non-normative individuals. The study is situated within the field of disability studies, and its key theoretical concepts are drawn from the works of Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Lennard J. Davis, and Klaudia Muca. The author analyzes twenty-first-century Polish children’s books (including works by Katarzyna Ryrych, Magda Papuzińska, Eliza Piotrowska, Olga Masiuk, Maria Ewa Letki, Spell, and Agnieszka Kossowska) from a literary-historical perspective, contextualized against earlier texts from the twentieth century (including those by Zofia Bardówna, Władysław Buchner, Jadwiga Ruth Charlewska, and Seweryna Szmaglewska). The author distinguishes four main models of disability: one defined by staring (a category drawn from the works of Rosemarie Garland-Thomson), one focused on giving a voice to people with disabilities, one centered on notions of diversity and otherness, and the author’s original concept of diffuse disability. Diffuse disability is defined as a mode of representation in which various individual traits are presented without being clearly assigned to a specific type of disability. It appears in children’s literature as an aspirational model, belonging to the realm of a progressive utopia. Among the analyzed works, Różowe środy albo podróż z ciotką Huldą by Sylvia Heinlein (translated by Tomasz Ososiński) is identified as the most complete realization of this model (an example from foreign literature included due to the pioneering nature of the proposed approach). The author also identifies motifs that anticipate this way of perceiving disability in Polish children’s literature, particularly in the prose of Katarzyna Ryrych and Irena Landau.

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Ciało zdegradowane, ciało odtworzone: człowiek protetyczny w literackiej wizji Juliusza Kadena-Bandrowskiego

Aleksandra Dębińska

Wielogłos, Issue 2 (68) 2026, 2026, pp. 27-45

https://doi.org/10.4467/2084395XWI.26.013.23570

This article analyzes the literary image of a disabled war veteran as a prosthetic man (homo prostheticus) in Juliusz Kaden-Bandrowski’s short story Na forcie. (Po wszystkiem) [At the Fort. (After Everything)] from the collection Przymierze serc i inne nowele [The Covenant of Hearts and Other Short Stories, 1924]. The author examines how Polish interwar literature reconfigures masculinity in the face of physical limb loss and technological body reconstruction, focusing on the hybrid relationship between the organic body and its prosthesis, as well as the performative perception of masculinity in the military environment. The analysis shows that, contrary to the idealistic vision of postwar states, according to which prostheses were meant to restore the functionality of the disabled body, everyday life and literature reveal their ambivalent nature: prostheses do not so much reconstruct functionality as highlight limitations, consequently contributing to the marginalization of men with disabilities. As a result, homo prostheticus appears as a figure of radical visibility and technology, instead of normalizing the body, intensifies its strangeness, thus placing it in the register of the uncanny.

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Od autopatografii do autoteorii i z powrotem. O Znikaniu Izabeli Morskiej w perspektywie studiów o niepełnosprawności

Julia Iwanicka

Wielogłos, Issue 2 (68) 2026, 2026, pp. 47-72

https://doi.org/10.4467/2084395XWI.26.014.23571

This article examines Izabela Morska’s book Znikanie [Vanishing] through the lens of disability studies and as autotheory–a genre combining autobiographical prose with academic discourse. The author adopts a broad understanding of disability studies, encompassing chronic illness and its artistic representations, including Morska’s autopathography. The aim is to demonstrate the potential of autotheory as a tool for capturing the experience of illness and disability on both individual and socio-political levels. The article outlines key insights into autotheory and its intersections with disability studies. Selected aspects of Vanishing are then analyzed: the impact of class status on navigating the healthcare system, architectural barriers, and the theme of embodiment. This approach illuminates Morska’s autotheoretical, non-confessional project, in which personal experiences are mobilized to construct an intertextual, socially engaged theory of illness and disability.

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Drżące ciało późnej prozy Jerzego Pilcha. Teksty pisane w chorobie oraz krytyka literacka wobec przemian ich stylu i form

Maciej Duda

Wielogłos, Issue 2 (68) 2026, 2026, pp. 73-90

https://doi.org/10.4467/2084395XWI.26.015.23572

This article aims to reinterpret Jerzy Pilch’s final four prose books–Zuza albo czas oddalenia, Portret młodej wenecjanki, Żywego ducha, and Żółte światło–by reading them from a somatic and psychodynamic perspective. Its secondary objective is to compare this reading with the existing critical reception of these works. The author argues that the shifts in the style and composition of Pilch’s late prose are closely related to the author’s experience of illness and aging. The body–of the characters, the narrator, and the text itself–serves as a key interpretative figure in this analysis.
The research methodology draws on the concept of somatopoetics and the tools of psychodynamic criticism, which emphasizes affects, projections, and relationships with the object. The author analyzes specific images (such as the bodies of the female characters) and the composition of the texts (including their fragmentary nature, digressions, and narrative breakdown). The source material also incorporates selected statements by literary critics.
The author argues that the bodies of the female characters function as metaphors for the writer’s creative condition: the artificiality, surgical alterations, and palimpsestic nature of the female figures reflect the experience of bodily interference and the loss of agency. The disintegration of the composition and the abbreviated phrasing are interpreted not merely as an aesthetic weakness, but as a record of the “trembling” of both the body and the text. The critical reception was dominated by a normative-aesthetic perspective, leading to disappointment and negative assessments; less common was a biographical reading–an attempt to “save” the late texts as evidence of illness.
The article concludes by proposing a reading of Pilch’s late prose as a literary project in which form (its fragmentary character and reduction of rhetoric) constitutes a conscious–and at the same time unconscious–record of the experience of disintegration. Because literary criticism focused on comparisons between this prose and Pilch’s earlier “masterful” phrasing, it failed to notice this dynamic earlier. By proposing a change of perspective, this study moves away from aesthetic evaluation towards a somaticaffective analysis. This allows us to recognize Pilch’s late works not as a regression, but as a different, existential form of creativity.

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Przyczynek do projektu krytyki impulsywnej

Arleta Galant

Wielogłos, Issue 2 (68) 2026, 2026, pp. 91-109

https://doi.org/10.4467/2084395XWI.26.016.23573

This article contributes to the project of impulsive criticism, which aims to highlight the necessity of turning toward physical sensitivity within contemporary posthumanist theories and practices (philosophical, literary, and artistic) that either address or remain silent on the experience of disability. The starting point for this reflection is Julia Kristeva’s notion of “catastrophic anxiety,” which renders disability a condition incomparable to other forms of social exclusion and complicates the creation of effective or agentive emancipatory narratives.
One of the article’s key hypotheses is that impulse, or impulsiveness–understood as the energy of bodily stimuli, the body’s biophysical and drive-based resource, and a condition enabling a “turn toward physicality”–unlike such notions as empathy, support, or imagination, makes it possible to approach non-normative forms of embodiment by posing questions of consent or refusal in relation to bodily resistance and force, possible corporeal metamorphoses, and the radical mortality of bodies. The experience of disability is thus recognized as fundamental to the contemporary humanities, particularly those concerned with the “recovery” of the materiality of both human and nonhuman embodiments. From this perspective, impulsiveness–understood as a critical posture and practice combining psychoanalysis and performance theory–becomes a gesture of refusal: a refusal to participate in the production of knowledge and theoretical frameworks that remain inconsistent with what is idiomatic, embodied, and non-narrative.

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Ku roślinnym ekologiom niepełnosprawności. Nie jestem rośliną, jestem z rośliny, jestem z rośliną: o ludzko-rośl-innych wspólnotach na marginesie solo performatywnego Aleksandry Skotarek Nie jestem rośliną. Strumień świadomości

Monika Rogowska-Stangret

Wielogłos, Issue 2 (68) 2026, 2026, pp. 111-132

https://doi.org/10.4467/2084395XWI.26.017.23574

The aim of this article is to read Aleksandra Skotarek’s solo performance, I Am Not a Plant: A Stream of Consciousness (based on texts by Aleksandra Skotarek and Virginia Woolf, directed by Justyna Wielgus, with dramaturgy by Justyna Lipko-Konieczna; Warsaw, Teatr 21, premiere April 23, 2023), through the lens of “environmentalism of the injured”–a theoretical framework and simultaneously an ethical and political stance proposed by Sunaura Taylor. The environmentalism of the injured emphasizes the network of connections and relationships between human and more-than-human beings in the context of disability during times of socio-environmental and climatic crises. It underscores the ethical and political importance of “staying with the trouble,” which implies both recognizing and acknowledging the wrongs afflicting both human and nonhuman bodies, as well as the courage to draw alternative ways of living, sets of values, and practices from the experience of disability and living with the wound.
Against the backdrop of critiques of the Vitruvian Man formulated from critical perspectives (particularly feminist theories, disability studies, plant and animal studies, and critical posthumanism), I present Taylor’s work and her intersectional analyses of disability, animality, and ecology to highlight the motif of plants, marginal in her work, as a potentially productive area for thinking about disability. I analyze the solo performance in relation to three signatures of the environmentalism of the injured: relationality, the ethics of living-with, and the struggle against inequality; in doing so, I demonstrate the necessity of remaining with the ambivalence of these categories, which cannot be inscribed into simple visions of an ideal world. Thus, the article proposes a shift toward plant ecologies of disability and a reflection on the potential of human-plant communities at the intersection of disability and the nonhuman, particularly plant life. It is an attempt to develop an ethical and political position that emphasizes the common conditions of life shared by humans and plants under capitalism, alongside an opposition to life-destroying, extractivist logic.

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Poza sztywnymi ramami reprezentacji. Analiza wideoperformansu Ciało w ciało z Marilyn

Ewelina Godlewska-Byliniak

Wielogłos, Issue 2 (68) 2026, 2026, pp. 133-153

https://doi.org/10.4467/2084395XWI.26.018.23575

This article examines the interrelations of bodily experience, disability, and femininity through an analysis of the video performance Body to Body with Marilyn [Ciało w ciało z Marilyn], created in 2021 by Teatr 21 actresses Maja Kowalczyk and Aleksandra Skotarek in collaboration with producers Justyna Wielgus and Justyna Lipko-Konieczna, as part of the DIS-Lecture series curated by Saša Asentić. The event provided an opportunity for artists with disabilities–primarily intellectual disabilities–to articulate performative statements reflecting on their artistic practice. This article foregrounds the importance of recognizing these artists as legitimate contributors to both disability-related and theatrical discourses, treating the actresses’ statements as an integral component of the analysis rather than merely its point of departure.
The author argues that themes present in earlier works by Teatr 21–such as the body, sexuality, femininity, and the shifting boundaries between the private and the public– find their most fully articulated expression here. Situating the performance within a feminist framework, the article demonstrates that its mode of articulation grants it the character of a feminist manifesto. The main aim of this article is to identify strategies for representing the disabled female body and to redefine stereotypical images of femininity and disability, presenting these categories beyond rigid frameworks of visual representation. The author advances the thesis that the actresses actively destabilize conventional representational boundaries, offering images with emancipatory potential through the disruption of entrenched visual clichés. The theoretical framework of this study draws on feminist and critical disability studies, particularly the foundational work of Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, supplemented by later reinterpretations of this perspective, including those proposed by Alison Kafer.

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Violent Intimacy

Natalia Pamuła

Wielogłos, Issue 2 (68) 2026, 2026, pp. 155-162

https://doi.org/10.4467/2084395XWI.26.019.23576

“Violent intimacy,” the central concept developed in the text, is an affective structure connecting a mother caring for a disabled child. Violent intimacy stems from sacrifice and love, but also from a lack of choice: the state and its institutions shift the responsibility for caring for a person with a disability onto the family, most often onto the mother. The literary, non-fiction, and journalistic texts analyzed show that violent intimacy is not synonymous with care: although professional caregivers are often forced to take on such activities, the ideological coercion behind violent intimacy is different and stems from the patriarchal order, the tradition of the Polish Mother, and the lack of structural solutions that would guarantee independent living for people with disabilities. In other words, violent intimacy draws attention to the cost of sacrifice behind the sometimes lifelong care of a disabled child and shows that it is a trap for both parties: the mother and the child, who have no choice but to remain in this relationship.

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Title and imprint pages PDF Table of Contents PDF About the authors PDF

Słowa kluczowe: disability in children’s literature, staring in children’s literature, disability studies, diffuse disability, Juliusz Kaden-Bandrowski, war disability, masculinity, war, carnality, Izabela Morska, autotheory, disability studies, autopathography, chronic illness, autobiography, theoretical discourse, Jerzy Pilch, body, illness, contemporary literature, prose, literary criticism, physical sensitivity, mortality, metamorphosis, disability, disability, plant, environmentalism of the injured, Western human, posthumanism, disability, femininity, feminism, body, representation, care, care work, disability, family, Pola nd

Funding information

The publication of this volume was financed by the Jagiellonian University in Kraków – Faculty of Polish Studies.