The purpose of this article is to present selected women’s narratives from the agricultural periphery of Upper Silesia – the Hlučín region. The author focuses on the works of Eva Tvrdá and Anna Malchárková, their self-positioning, the way they tell their stories, and the common elements in their narratives about the indigenous women. Local women had faced multifaceted discrimination throughout the 20th century – partly based on ethnicity and faith, partly based on gender. Raised in a patriarchal culture, they were subjected to its patterns and replicated them. Still, their position vis-à-vis men was ambivalent – they were able to take over their responsibilities, and they also wanted to decide about their reproductive work. Significant for the protagonists of the analyzed texts is their bond with the land, rediscovered by their female descendants. The granddaughters, however, partially change the patterns their grandmothers and mothers developed, breaking the circle of silence and quiet acceptance of their own fate.

The article concerns various dimensions of literary recollection of Zaolzie – the part of Cieszyn Silesia conceded to Czechoslovakia in 1920, although the Polish population dominated there. The area still generates the identity problems for inhabitants of Polish origin who feel, on the one hand, forgotten by Poland, and on the other hand – connected with it through the cultural memory. Their lives are easier, whenever they relate to Czech culture, but they are under pressure from the older generation, who oftentimes equate “Polishness” with regionalism and isolationism. Especially men and women of letters feel the weight of patriotic duties, as they therefore take into critical consideration the identity as well as recollect the past – recovering contents wiped from the social memory. The article’s author analyses how writers and poets struggle with Zaolzian taboos, historical traumas, troublesome phantoms and ideologies. In respect to seven types of forgetting detailed by Paul Connerton, she considers three main relations: with Poland, with the divided identity as well as with being locked in the locality.

The author of the text presents the overview of religious attitudes in Mickiewicz’s Dziady part III and compares them with the mystical epigrams of Johannes Scheffler, which were of interest to Mickiewicz during the concept creation of Dziady. Based on the principle of vision (Priest Peter and Eve) or improvisation (Konrad), three characters experiencing religious ecstasies are assigned to separate religious attitudes, successively gnostic, mystical and magical. The author identifies similarities and differences in the states and aspirations of the various characters, and also demonstrates the influence of Silesius’ epigrams and theosophical thought on the religious-philosophical structure of the drama.

The article presents the possibilities of applying spectrality theories derived from the writings of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok as well as Jacques Derrida and Julian Wolfreys to literary research on the example of the post-memorial, auto-fictional novel of the French writer and psychoanalyst Philippe Grimbert titled The Secret. The aim of the novel analysis is to indicate the specific structural gaps occurring at its various levels (narrative, diegetic world, relationship between the author and the narrator, relationship between the content of the novel and the author’s actual biography) which are places where ghostly entities and forms appear. Discovering and exorcising them is the very essence of the work of (endless) interpretation, both in Grimbert’s novels and in all literary texts.

The article discusses the figure of a village fool as an outsider in folk culture and the typology of this kind of creation in the works of Tadeusz Nowak in relation to the contemporary research on otherness. At the core of the exposition, there is the silhouette of an individual marked by disability and alienated from the community, which through an undefined form of essential distinctiveness is something that escapes clear classification and undermines the structures of cultural division between the foreign and the familiar, teetering on the border of these two meanings. Subject of the analysis involves issues that delve into the problem of otherness of a mentally disabled character in the face of the archetypical cultural codes, phenomenological initiations, and ethical systems. The methodological background is based in the concepts drawn from the writings of Bernhard Waldenfels and Zygmunt Bauman, which – although not addressing rural culture – provide directions for reflecting on contemporaneity as well as engaging with the interpretations of the figure of the village fool in folk culture at multiple levels and the transformed realizations of this motif in Nowak’s work.

The text is an attempt to analyze the life writing practices of neo-avant-garde visual artists: Erna Rosenstein and Urszula Broll, through the concept of self-utopia and experiences of crisis. The source of knowledge on this subject are not only objects of art (paintings, drawings, artistic objects), but also literary texts (poetry, prose), notes of dreams, memories, private notes from the artists’ archives. The author considers the relations between the sense of crisis and disintegration experienced by both artists and their utopian vision of art and artistic practice, including writing activity (poetry, fairy tales). This interpretation is prompted by the perception of Rosenstein’s and Broll’s works as mediumistic and meditative, which allowed them to develop spiritual practices, as well as the perspective of the artists’ self-utopian art-life projects, the assumptions of which are consistent with post-anthropocentric humanistic thought.

According to bell hooks, the politics of localisation makes counter-hegemonic practices possible. The article reflexes on tensions between the center and the peripheries. The center here stand for the Polish mainstream literary criticism from the turn of 20^th and 21^st centuries, specifically in reference to the non-heteronormative literature, exposing the context of democracy tolerating the otherness and strongly valuing the literary works based on their quality, which frequently leads to the ignorance about “one’s own voice” (which Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick finds necessary for the queer perspective). The peripheries are represented by Ewa Schilling – the author who consequently portrays Polish lesbians’ existence from 1993 till today. The paper highlights her selected localisations (lesbian and gay magazines Filo and Inaczej, Borussia Cultural Community and Seqoja – publishing house founded by her) as well as the characteristics of her work. The current “flood” of multiple publications labelled with the “queer” umbrella term, sends the 90s’ literature to the peripheries once more.