The article is dedicated to the so-called “theory of conquest.” In the context of Old Polish literature (texts in Polish and Latin from the 16th and 17th centuries), this broad term refers to the belief that at the dawn of the nation’s history, the Sarmatian nobility invaded and subjugated the indigenous people, thus turning them into slaves (peasants). Such an alleged mythical narrative is sometimes equated with Sarmatism. The “theory of conquest” – in the eyes of many contemporary researchers and journalists – was to become the key exclusive myth of the civil elite, used by the nobility to justify its privileged position in the state. The author of the article argues that the claims of the popularity and even of the very existence of “conquest theory” in the indicated historical period are not supported by sufficient source evidence. Therefore, it should be considered rather as a problematic 20th-century interpretative framework or even a modern historiographic myth. Citing quotes from modern scientific literature, journalism, and popularizing texts, the author discusses the broad diffusion of the 20th-century “theory about the existence of theory.” By confronting the latter with source texts, she tries to prove its incompatibility with early modern discursive practices which were constructed to justify the erstwhile hierarchical social order. The article also tries to explain the origins and reasons for the popularity of the “theory of conquest” as an interpretative framework.

The text proposes to read Bartleby, the Scrivener as a case of modern genealogy of Otherness. The aporias in Melville’s intertextual prose loudly reverberate in theology and philosophy – therefore one cannot read Melville’s novella without referencing the Bible but also the writings of Blanchot, Derrida, Levinas, Deleuze. Bartleby owes his popularity to the genius of Melville, who, by commenting on the America of his times, included in his short prosaic works hundreds of ambiguous and internally contradictory tropes. The aporias which we now call Bartleby have been discussed by such contemporary critics as Žižek and Butler, who in the formula “I would prefer not to” see the outline of an emancipatory project in late-modernity capitalism. “Compression Effect” is the literary testimony of the experience of a new community which faces an “excess” of politically and religiously engaged texts with a simultaneous “shortage” of divinity in life institutionalized by modernity.

The aim of this paper is to identify and unpack ideological strategies manifested through translation criticism in the Rocznik Literacki, a Polish literary review published in the 1930s, in the context of the notion of World Literature. With the help of the toolbox from comparative literary studies, translation studies, and cultural studies, the article traces the dynamics of socio-political tensions in Poland in the 1930s. It also presents an overview of the reception of foreign literatures in the Polish periodical.

The sections of the annual devoted to works translated from various languages reflected the reviewers’ urge to establish norms for translation and literary market that were apparently solely linguistic in nature. In fact, they reflected the discussions on the role which particular cultures (should) play in the multilingual and divided state shortly after it regained independence. The paper discusses the particularly complex representation of ancient (Latin) and Jewish (Yiddish) tradition in Rocznik Literacki.

The aim of the article is to provide a preliminary identification of the mechanisms of power in Józef Mackiewicz’s war novels. The first part focuses on the tools of discipline and biopower. Particular attention is paid to the methods of gaining knowledge of the individual subject (confession) and the collective subject (Foucauldian security, immune mechanisms). In both cases, the mechanism of acquiring knowledge of the subject is at the same time a method of its production. The second part complements these considerations by providing an analysis of methods of resistance to both types of power. The third part considers the thesis according to which the mechanisms of population production and protection may be combined in Mackiewicz’s novels with the so-called immunological understanding of war.

The article is a reconstruction of the project of “world literature” as presented in Milan Kundera’s essays. The writings of Witold Gombrowicz have a special place in Kundera’s conceptualisation (alongside those of Kafka, Musil or Broch), and the argumentation follows commentaries on him. The analyses presented here are concerned with three dimensions of Kundera’s project: historical-literary, theoretical-literary, and interpretative. The last of these is implemented not only by means of interpretative remarks on specific works by selected writers scattered throughout the essays, but also in Kundera’s inspirations and borrowings. The article discusses Kundera’s novel Život je jinde (Life is Elsewhere) as an example of dependence considered in terms of Harold Bloom’s “influence” on the writer.

The text presents a new approach to the Memoir from the Warsaw Uprising by Miron Białoszewski – an analysis from the perspective of anality. The article suggests that wartime suspends the usual taboo of the “privatisation of shit,” and public toilets in shelters become new “agoras,” a function which they used to perform in antiquity. Białoszewski’s quasi-anthropological account of the Uprising actually mentions toilets and the organisation of physiological life in every new place to which he and his company move during the period of two months. War is anal because it is a mass production of “waste” (corpses). However, the most important scene also connects anality to writing poetry by two young gay poets. This scene, here called Urszene, is analysed as a desublimation of homosexuality.

In the article the author reconstructs the critical reception of the Poem about the Municipal Slaughterhouse by Tadeusz Śliwiak (Andrzej Kaliszewski, Konstanty Pieńkosz, Jan Pieszczachowicz, Artur Sandauer, Stanisław Stabro, Piotr Sobolczyk) and interprets the work using posthumanist instruments to prove that it is ecological and pacifist. The main idea of the author is to depict both the animals transported to the Municipal Slaughterhouse in Lviv and the Jews working there. The poetic volume of Śliwiak meets the demand of Éric Baratay, who wrote that the animal could not continue to be a white spot of history. The poet emphasizes that animality is a state devoid of human aggression and desire for domination and assigns a negative value to what is considered human (if there murder among people is impermissible, it is due to fear of spreading violence to human actors). In the Poem about the Municipal Slaughterhouse, the strategy that prevents animals from being brought into the role of raw material is the perspective of a child which sees the death of animals as equal to this of humans. Until now, the reception of the poem has been dominated by analyses of its dominant turpistic and expressionist aesthetics, reducing Śliwiak’s testimony to the role of a “great metaphor of war.” The author proves that the poet emphasizes the stigma of violence (the human victims were forced to work on the handling of the bodies of non-human victims), which invalidates the hierarchy of victims, preventing a comparison of suffering. In addition, the author describes two situations depicted in the poem using the category of excess (by Wolfgang Sofsky), in which human life could be taken away at the whim of the overmen.

The article is a case study of Jacek Dehnel’s novel Matka Makryna as an instrument for criticising the traditional model of patriotism. The object of analysis is the self-creation of the main character – a Russian officer’s widow who introduces herself as Mother Macrina, a superior of Basilian nuns in Minsk, oppressed by the Russians. Over time, she becomes “a martyr of Polishness,” a symbol of the suffering of Poles caused by the invader. Jacek Dehnel presents the supposed Macrina not only as a talented fabricator, but also as a personification of an antimodern, xenophobic image of Polishness. Closely linked to this image is the way of understanding patriotism based on an obsession with independence which continues to be cultivated in the present day. It is this traditional model of patriotism that is the main object of criticism in Dehnel’s novel. As a result, Mother Macrina gains a clear connection with contemporary Polish culture that is unique among other novelised biographies.

The article is a review of Aleksandra Ubertowska’s book Historie biotyczne. Pomiędzy estetyką a geotraumą (Biotic Stories. Between Aesthetics and Geotrauma). The author presents the most important methodological premises and inspirations, especially the theories of the fourth wave of ecocriticism: ecomaterialism, biosemiotics, and ecodeconstructionism, which propose to perceive nature as a text. This perspective produces a specificfunction of metaphors, that is, the deconstruction of the discourse-matter, text-nature opposition through their metaphorical, sympoetic interweaving. In this strategy, one can recognize the method of diffraction reading, which excludes the position of an external, distanced observer, using a neutral, transparent language and aiming at entangling separate orders. The author also places Ubertowska’s project on the map of contemporary Polish ecocriticism.