Marek Wilczyński - Böcker

This book focuses on an unexplored area of Edward Bond’s writing. While different studies examine the violence present in his plays or his dramatic theory, questions around his powerful female characters have remained unsolved. None of the criticism has developed specifically the role of these women as speakers of their social context. The human condition that Bond depicts in his plays is not gender-oriented. From his early plays, Edward Bond has been considered misogynist, but this book presents the possibility to discover a different Bond as a writer on women with powerful voices.The reader of this book will discover in these women female spokeswomen of revolution, committed and suffering mothers but also the personification of evil and wickedness. Emotions and ideas will be analyzed in these pages in a journey through Bond’s feminine universe closer to reality than to stage. Justice, the essence of humanity or the nature of oppression are dealt with through the construction of brilliant characters with no possibility of catharsis. This vision of drama as a social forum clearly exemplifies Bond’s defense on the possibility of change.

This book studies the complex relations between time and visual technologies in the oeuvre of Thomas Pynchon within the general framework of the culture and politics of time. It argues that notwithstanding a postmodern tendency towards the spatialization of experience, temporality constitutes a major concern in Pynchon’s novels, which explore the problematic of time-experience and temporal representation against the background of the contemporary technosphere and its temporal regimes. By examining photography, cinema, television, computers, and the Internet, this book puts Pynchon’s engagement with visual technologies into a perspective that elucidates their workings as time machines in relation to both experientiality and materiality.

The book is an exploration of the affinities between Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics and Virginia Woolf’s philosophy of beauty and Being embodied in her oeuvre. The study addresses beauty as a mode of being rather than a mere adornment of human existence. Tracing Plato’s legacy in the two authors, it espouses the proximity of truth and beauty, and argues for beauty’s restorative capacity discerned in the repetitive patterns of the universe. Showing the poetics of Gadamer and Woolf as mutually interpenetrating, it encourages to see the beauty of the poetic word as a gateway to Being. This meditation on beauty and Being contests the prevailing ways of thinking about the (in)dependent fields of literature and philosophy.

When, in 1948, Tony Harrison entered Leeds Grammar School as a scholarship boy, he found himself, as Richard Hoggart saw, “at the friction point of two cultures”. His schooling introduced him to the “classics”; but it also deprived him of a clear identification with the place where he grew up. His work reflects and explores this tension; and it may be seen, in some ways, as a form of “identity construction.”The book examines key texts such as v. and the School of Eloquence sequence, where this “construction” takes different forms—oscillating between identity as a state, or a process; as continuity, or change; or as the outcome of conformity, or revolt.This second edition has been extensively revised and includes a new chapter on Harrison’s Elegies.

This book offers new close readings of contemporary Irish drama in the context of postcolonial Biblical studies. Developing Christopher Morash’s historiographical metaphor of Babel, it combines appropriations of this and other selected Biblical themes of building found in plays by such authors as Malachy McKenna (Tillsonburg), Dermot Bolger (Ballymun Trilogy), Stacey Gregg (Shibboleth), Richard Dormer (Drum Belly) or Sebastian Barry (Tales of Ballycumber). The monograph explores the stances contributed by key scholars specialising in Irish drama and theatre (Christopher Morash, Shaun Richards, Helen Heusner Lojek), draws on the most recent findings within postcolonial Biblical criticism and touches upon the assumptions of subcreation studies (Mark J. P. Wolf).

This study is an analysis of the novels Black Water (1992), Blonde (2000), and My Sister, My Love (2008) by Joyce Carol Oates. Based on real-life characters (Mary Jo Kopechne, Marilyn Monroe, JonBenét Ramsey), these works blend fact and fiction, historical and poetic truth, and create a new way to recount facts that allow the writer to give a new voice to people who cannot speak for themselves anymore. The present book addresses the stories behind the novels, their genre and stylistic features, but is also an exploration of several aspects of American culture and society and their issues connected to consumerism, the cult of beauty and celebrity, and how they affect American women’s lives and power relations with men.

The study offers new readings of early works, both novels and short stories, of Samuel Beckett in the context of Beckett’s signature. The author analyses the given signature through such terms as language, the neutrum and memory, simultaneously incorporating the mentioned terms in the context of Beckett’s early prose. The first part of the book is theoretical and concentrates on coining the term signature through different philosophical viewpoints (e.g., Lotman, Blanchot, Bergson), whereas the second part analyses Beckett’s early works in the context of the signature (e.g., Proust, More Pricks Than Kicks, Murphy). The book also analyses a posthumously-published short story Echo’s Bones that opens new interpretation paths for twenty-first century Beckettologists.

The book explores the notion of borderlands and the concept of nomadic subjectivity as manifested in selected novels by Chicana/Latina and contemporary Polish women authors. It seeks to propose a poetics of borderlands that emerges from the condition of nepantla (being torn, not belonging anywhere). Language, collective identities and motherhood are the main issues under scrutiny. Application of feminist literary criticism, postcolonial criticism and comparative literature studies in examination of literary works reveals interesting parallels between works of authors that have little in common at first glance. One of the book objectives is to draw attention to contemporary Polish writers, whose oeuvre is not widely researched in the mainstream literary studies.