Adam Dziadek – författare

This book illustrates the problems connected with the body and the sign: the real body and the body of the text, somaticism and semiology (both as a general sign theory and in the medical sense as «symptomatology»). The author seeks to derive a more general principle from these two words, referring to the representation of experience in different literary texts. If we are talking about the representation of experience, we cannot, by any means, ignore the body that becomes the essential point of reference for human experience. This general principle aims at creating a matter of concept, a somatic criticism project, which is closely related to the issue of rhythm in literary texts - a rhythm understood as an intermediary between the body and the sense of the text.

The book stems from an interdisciplinary and transdiscursive approach to describe Polish masculinities of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, along with the "new masculinity" that has become increasingly distinct in the early twenty-first century. A collection of texts, the book covers Polish literature from Romanticism to the present day to thoroughly rethink the Polish literary studies in the context of various masculinities shaped in Polish culture over the last two centuries. The individual texts study masculinity with a plethora of methods, ranging from psychoanalysis and deconstruction through feminist literary criticism to queer studies. The scrutinized works of fiction reveal invaluable culture data - often constituting the most important source of knowledge about reality - that no other field of art could map so precisely.