Wojciech Kalaga – författare

The book analyses - with reference to the Soviet socialist realism - the relations between the structure/semantics of the literary text and its ideological and political context. Focusing on works typical of the socialist realism as well as on its subversive exponents (including books by Kharms, Bulgakov, Ehrenburg, Prishvin) the author claims that the dominant aesthetics influenced not only the mainstream socialist-realist texts, but also shaped the ways in which the main doctrine was questioned and opposed.

There is no sapient question: to eat or not to eat? Eating comes before culture, but with culture it becomes more than just eating. It is with the purpose of exploring the relation between culture and consuming food – a relation far more complex than it might seem at first sight – that this book has been intended. In this sense, the book inscribes itself within that trend in cultural studies whose main objectives include the defamiliarization of the commonplace. While its subject matter is quite specific, the range of particular issues – apart from theoretical ones – involves different geo-cultural areas and different temporal environments: from Sri Lanka via Europe to South America, and from ancient Rome via medieval times to contemporary England. Likewise, the cultural realms in which food and eating appear as significant and meaningful components of reality range from fiction to practices of everyday life, from gender identity to eroticism, from economy to epistemology.

The book addresses and interrogates discursive and cultural practices that are (or can be seen as) related to the well-established if elusive phenomenon known as Political Correctness or PC. The individual contributors look into PC-related cases within the humanities, literature, and the media. Accordingly, the publication is divided into three sections: Part I, «Revisiting the Issue: History, Theory, Language», examines PC in the contexts of three types of discourse: historical, theoretical and ideological, and linguistic. Part II, «Literary Case Studies», offers examinations of chosen literary works and authors. Part III, «The Media», looks at manifestations of PC-related issues in film and the popular magazine. Altogether the publication shows a variety of approaches to the PC phenomenon. The assumption of the editors is that while PC has indubitably penetrated contemporary culture, it continues to stir controversy. This scholarly debate is a response to what may be described as PC’s universal reign.

This book debunks the myth of Polish Modernist literature as rooted in rash, immediate expression. The author compares programmatic statements on language by turn-of-the-century writers such as Wacław Berent, Bolesław Leśmian, Stanisław Brzozowski or Karol Irzykowski with notions deduced from their literary works. He demonstrates that these writers’ linguistic self-consciousness informs their implicitly self-reflexive texts and sheds light on their values and characteristic qualities. The author treats Modernist literature itself as a sort of «language» – a distinct entity that emerged through systematic differentiation within the general literary discourse. The book enhances the understanding of the transformations behind this important philosophical and artistic movement.

This book represents an attempt to capture different links between modern literature and music. The author examines strict intertextual correlations, the phenomena of musicality and musicality of literary works, the musical structure in literature, so-called musical literary texts. He focuses on the novel Le Cœur absolu by Philippe Sollers, the poem Todesfuge by Paul Celan, the Preludio e Fughe by Umberto Saba and the drama Judasz z Kariothu [Judas Iscariot] by Karol Hubert Rostworowski. The analysis also includes Stanisław Barańczak’s cycle of poems Podróż zimowa: Wiersze do muzyki Franza Schuberta [Winter Journey: Poems to the Music of Franz Schubert] and a fragment of Scène from Hérodiade by Stéphane Mallarmé in Paul Hindemith’s composition «Hérodiade» de Stéphane Mallarmé.

This book consists of nine chapters devoted to representations of melancholia in 19th-century art and literature. A noteworthy feature of the book is its use of concepts from later works by Sigmund Freud, Jean Clair, Jean Starobinski, Julia Kristeva and others. Those concepts elucidate further contexts of the notion of melancholia, which are presented not in isolation but juxtaposed with the philosophical background of the concept (starting from Hippocrates and Aristotle). Thus, the book not only provides a survey of images and modes of behaviour of 19th-century individuals, but also discusses the meanings of melancholia as they appeared in European culture over time.

The book presents the various viewpoints that poetics, literary history and Western rhetoric have adopted throughout Western history. The aim of poetics is to render the specificity of the literary discourse by either highlighting the extra literary generative forces or by focusing on the intrinsic study of literary works. Rhetoric chiefly places emphasis on the verbal effects of discourses whereas literary history predominantly examines the temporal succession of the literary systems or of the literary institution. The author focuses on the three sections: poetics, rhetoric, and literary history and provides an introductory study on the subject of reference.

The work follows the vicissitudes of the concept of difference in contemporary cultural discourse: a shift from the Platonic notion of difference as a pillar of separation to Gilles Deleuze’s notion of pure difference as the ground for communication. Special attention is paid to the relevance of pure difference for gender studies, in particular, as a means of redefining the key relations of mind-body and man-woman. The shape the relations in question assume in patriarchal reality (and the consequent subjugation of the feminine) is presented indirectly, via contemporary readings of the Marquis de Sade, which in large part treat the libertine community as a caricature of patriarchy. On the other hand, the liberating effect of pure difference is traced in the feminine tenor of Gilles Deleuze’s and Hélène Cixous’s reflection on thought and subjectivity, the affinity between these two gender-marked voices being itself of feminine nature. The principal aim of this book is to point out difference-related controversies of gender theory.

The problem of signifying the other within the logocentric language occupies an important place in Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics. (Un)Saying the Other examines the ways in which Levinasian discourse – the discourse always already partaking of ontological injustice – enables the ethical articulation of otherness. The author explores the unfolding of ethical expression both opened and troubled by the allegorical and ironic ruptures of the logocentric language. Reflecting on the philosophical complications incumbent in the potentially infinite process of interrupting the ontological language, the book argues for the responsible rethinking of the ethical call to unsay.

The author treats, in historical and philosophical terms, the contributions of the traditionally marginalized genre of detective fiction to epistemology: how detective fiction not only traces the progression of knowledge and its discovery, as has been the traditional model for understanding this genre, but, in fact, constructs it through narrative. Particular focus is on Colin Dexter, creator of the Inspector Morse character and series. This work also links detective fiction to more legitimate, accepted realms of literature and criticism: semiotics (the reading of clues, with the body as a major one); epistolary fiction, long hailed as an early form of the modern novel; and heteroglossia, an important aspect of Marxist theory, here linked to the power struggles and imbalances produced by the pursuit and construction of knowledge.