Wojciech H. Kalaga – författare

A relationship between man and place has always attracted scientists’, scholars’, and artists’ attention. Succinctly subsumed in the concept of genius loci and implicated in the art of visual and linguistic description, topography of man’s existence invited debates among such disciplines as geography, economy, ecology, history, and philosophy. Revelations of Gloucester is a book which, including elements of all these areas of research, focuses on the variety of problems generated by the process of representing a place. Occupying a very special position on the cultural and historical map of the US, the city of Gloucester has had at least two champions of outstanding stature: Charles Olson, a leading avantgarde poet of the 1950s and 1960s whose Maximus Poems is one of the most ambitious modern attempts at creating a sequence of place-related verses, and Fitz Hugh Lane, a mid-nineteenth century American luminist painter who, from his Gloucester harbor house, investigated painterly and philosophical secrets of American light. Thus, the emphasis of the book is double: applying theoretical insights of phenomenology and deconstruction, it discusses the aesthetic and intellectual significance of both artists in relation to their home territory and tries to reconnoitre the metaphore of light seminal for the tradition of American transcendentalism.

The contributions in this volume examine literary and other texts as well as cultural and political discourses in relation to issues of identity formation and dis-formation, of self and society and of the socially local within the global. All these issues come into play through the exploration of the fantasmatic space of mutual mis-recognition and mythmaking between coloniser and colonised, between 'Africa' and 'Europe'.

This book analyzes Mo Yan’s writings as well as other scholarly interpretations of his writings. When Mo Yan from China was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the term «hallucinatory realism» was invented to describe his storytelling as a «merging» of folk tales, history, and the contemporary. The author stakes out a Marxist approach to theorizing the class ideology that underwrites what Mo Yan says he «knows» of the «nebulous terrain» where one supposedly experiences moments of «transcending» or going «beyond» class and politics in literary sensibility.

This fifth volume in the Litanic Verse series is centered upon the poetics of European litanic verse (genre structure, rhythm, rhetorical figures), as well as its philosophy and cosmology, with a particular focus on the space-time matrix within which the litanic world is depicted. The content of the book moves beyond an analysis of enumerations and parallelisms as it provides an insight into relevant cultural processes, including the history of religion and literary conventions from Antiquity to Early Modernity. This allows seemingly distant topics, such as comparative versification and European identity, to be related. Theoretical considerations are accompanied by examples mostly taken from Latin, English, French, German, Iberian, Italian, Scandinavian and Slavic poetry.

This book interrogates the concept of the subject in the poem, against the broader background of literary-theoretical issues related to the lyric subject. Specifically, what kind of subject is the subject in the poem? What relation does it have to other forms of subjectivation that human beings experience in their life practices? What is its singularity?“The Lyric Subject is a most impressive achievement: a shrewd evaluation of a wide range of writings (philosophical, linguistic, literary) bearing on the question of the lyric subject. With myriad poetic examples, Varja Balzˇalorsky Antic´ develops a rich, multileveled mapping of the various forms of subjectivity and agency in the lyric.”Jonathan Culler, Professor Emeritus at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York

Breathing Earth: The Polyphonic Lyric of Robert Bringhurst examines the innovative poems for multiple voices composed by the Canadian poet by drawing on the main insights of biosemiotics, ecophilosophy and material ecocriticism. In seeking to emulate the polyphonic texture of reality, Bringhurst’s ecopoetry directs readers’ attention to vibrant matter and to the entanglements of (non)human and (in)animate actants in a world that is a semiotic-material unity. In light of the current climate crisis, his polyphonic poems are a timely, wise reminder of the need to rethink the way humanity relates to the more-than-human world and to restore a deep ecological bond with breathing earth.