Thanks to infotopia, which nowadays has a role of strengthening the interpersonal communication, building society networks and civilization development, utopia has an opportunity to overcome negative stigma, and during the XXI century will stop being considered as an enemy of the open society. We can only hope that colonized cyberspace will only symbolize creative powers of technological utopia.

 

Author of the article offers an insight into three threads of utopian thinking in a world wide web environment. In the first of them, cyberspace operates – in terms of Gibson’s protypical Neuromancer – as a space of decentralized exchange of ideas. In the second, hypertext brings a promise of non-linear and democratized perception, an open-ended eutopia of shared knowledge. In the third, the web is a place of an intriguing meeting of man and machine inside posthumanism and digital humanities movements.

 

The paper aims to analyse worldbuilding strategies in a variety of eutopian (predominantly in literature) and dystopian narratives (in literature, movies and video games), in relation to the world-centred analyse that disseminates in contemporary narrative studies. Consequently, the study derives two possible worldbuilding models from a re­presentative number of utopian texts, that is (1) a typical for early modern utopias and modern imaginary voyages “portal-quest” model (world W1 → gate / journey → world W2) and (2) an emblematic for the most postmodern dystopias mo­del juxtaposing the centre and the peripheries, that deconstructs the first one in postcolonial perspective. Therefore, it becomes possible to compare worldbuilding foundations in so different a narrative like precursory 16th century Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and 21st century video game Bioshock: Infinite by Irrational Games – which subsequently encourages utopian studies to notice the most contemporary narrative achievements within the genre.

In 1528 Erasmus of Rotterdam had published dialogue Senatulus sive Gynajkosynedrion, which is part of the popular collection Colloquia familiaria. In this text, there are women, who deliberate about organisation of future council of women. The idea of legislative women, challenging traditional social order („the world upside down”) was used by the author to indicate certain matters, relating to the social status or privilege of women. The question, which is included in the title of the article, is a result of the ambivalence of the text, because Senatulus can be readed not only as a joke of great humanist, but also as a satire on Erasmus’s contemporary political and social life.

 

The article focuses on the analysis of work of pop group Kraftwerk in utopian context. Kraftwerk’ work is treated as a intermedial combination of music, texts, visual art and scenical performance. Its main content is a comprehensive vision of non-existed (yet) world of the man-machine. Kraftwerk’s work is compared to avant-garde musical experiments and to classical literary (and film) utopias because numerous formal and ideological similarities. The article is also an attempt of explanation of social and political background of Kraftwerk’s transhumanist vision.

 

The article focuses on the origins of Eutopian and Dystopian aspects of selected works of Stanislaw Lem, which were divided into pre- and post-Thaw ones (due to the differences in their relation with the tradition of that genre). Eutopian characteristics can be found in the first science fiction stories of Lem (both quasi-social realistic ones, set in the Communist Bloc countries, and their darker counterparts, set on the other side of the Iron Curtain). Technology seems to be more important there than politics. Similarily, science and technology form the basis of Eutopian visions of communist paradise in The Astronauts and The Magellanic Cloud (as well as Dystopian images of the enemies of communism in both novels, Venusians and long-dead “Atlanteans”, i.e. NATO members). Their very creation seems to be an effect of Lem’s own desire to write about space travels, which – in Stalinist era – wasn’t possible any other way. After the Thaw, both Dystopian and Utopian elements in Lem’s fiction gradually lose their political characteristics, corresponing with the grow of Lem’s interest in more universal matters. His later utopias still seem to origin primarely from the field of science and technology, and not of politics or philosophy. Their tone reflects the author’s loss of faith in the possibility of creating the paradise (on Earth, or interplenatary one) through either political or technological means. This can be observed as well in what could be called ‘broken utopias’, like the world of short stories about Pirx the Pilot.

 

The article describes the functioning of “justice to come” in the English early modern culture in the light of Francis Bacon’s essay “Of Revenge” and the analysis of Act I of William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. It demonstrates that reflection on the utopia of justice is not limited to one literary genre only, but permeates other texts created in the era when the questions about perfect state and ideal ruler were especially pertinent.

 

The paper takes the perspective of Fredric Jameson’s thinking about utopia (from his Archeologies of the future) and is an attempt to answer the question of the status of the theories of symbolic exchange (Baudrillard, Goux) understood as specific iterations of the utopian thinking or the utopian impulse. Jameson sees today the power of the utopian narratives in the alternatives they give to the third stage of capitalism. That is why the main problem presented in this paper is precisely the alternative vision of social and economic relations projected by the researchers referring to the models of symbolic exchange in the primitive societies. Reading the concepts of Goux and Baudrillard in the light of the Jameson’s theory of utopia is to show their proximity with thinking about magical and religious practices on one hand, and, on the other hand, to the fundamental models of social relations in the primitive and ahistorical societies present in the fable and fantasy. These primitive societies believe in the possibility of exchange with the dead and do not surrender to the model of economy governed by the general equivalents: the phallus, the sovereign, the sign, the money.

 

In a review of a book Wielcy artyści ucieczek. Antologia tekstów o „Życiu i czasach Michaela K.” w trzydziestą rocznicę publikacji, an author analyses the mere idea of an anthology of interpretations, describing its two possible understandings: as a collection of incomparable perspectives and as a field of conflict. The author emphasizes difficulties of interpretational procedures related to the novel by J.M. Coetzee and points to a political meanings of an act of reading. Additionally, texts collected in the anthology are classified by different attitudes towards the work of meanings in the novel, and some reductional practices are criticized. Finally, the author places the anthology in a wider horizon of interpretational strategies in contemporary humanities, asking questions regarding their importance – or lack of it.

 

The main of paper is to show Inga Iwasiów’s ways of understanding how women’s novels (mainly written after 1989) deal with categories such as: women’s writing, theoretical borders, politics of literature. Ideas are shown in both ways: as literary practice and critical concepts. Also under consideration was taken literature of personal document, what made panoramic map of women’s writing more diversified, and furthermore, made interesting proposals of interpretation and reading (both, critical and personal) exquisitely useful and efficient.

 

This article is a review of Agnieszka Mrozik’s book Midwifes of transformation. Women, literature and power in Poland after 1989, which describes the situation of literature written by women following the 1989 changes in the Polish political system. The author focuses on the figure of the Polish Mother and conflicts between mothers and daughters. However positive aspects of motherhood are omitted. Agnieszka Mrozik also writes about autobiographies and the search for identity, in particular about emigrants and Jews. She takes into consideration even popular literature like Polish versions of Bridget Jones’ story. The aim of the review is to show how intentionally selective are the author’s examples and to write about the omitted matters.