Cross Roads – serie

With Hero, Conspiracy and Death: The Jewish Lectures, the author has written a book of sweeping significance for readers interested in Polish history, Jewish history, and the Holocaust in which she asks troubling questions: Can a Jew be both a Jew and a Pole? Are we right to talk of «worthy» and «unworthy» death in the Holocaust? What are the implications of Adam Mickiewicz’s philo-Semitism? In Zygmunt Krasiński’s anti-Semitism, do we see the «specter of elimination»? Are humanist and enlightenment values useful in analyzing the Holocaust, or did the experience of Nazi genocide render them obsolete? Tracing the history of anti-Jewish stereotypes in early nineteenth-century Poland (and beyond), the author offers answers to these questions that are bold, clear and compassionate.

The volume From Modern Theory to a Poetics of Experience contains a wide selection of essays, which were published during past decades in academic journal Teksty Drugie and were widely appreciated as significant contributions to the ongoing debate on principles and methods of literary studies. Articles gathered in this collection represent the main schools, tendencies and perspectives applied in contemporary criticism, including the most recent developments and the older traditions, which previously influenced our field. Their chronological succession seems to indicate certain direction of this development, which has moved literary studies from text-oriented, purely scientific procedures to more contextualized, interpretative approaches, labeled here as «poetics of experience».

This is a reader’s book about Wisława Szymborska’s poetry. She holds the Nobel Prize in Literature of 1996. The Contents of the book are the Nobel Lecture held in Stockholm at the official ceremony by the poet in December 1996, a choice of Polish essays about Szmyborska’s poetry and translations of her works into German, English, Spanish and French by Polish critics (translated into English). All essays were published at first in Polish in separated books or in literary revues. Since many years Wisława Szymborska’s poetry is translated into many different languages and loved by readers as intellectual and ironic comment to contemporary world. The book of critics written in Poland and by Western specialists on Polish literature shows how her poetry was read and seen on background of artistic tradition and experience of her generation and from the point of view of different currents in humanities.

Czesław Miłosz, poet, literary critic, essayist and Nobel Laureate, is a familiar person to the Anglophone literary community. But American and British critics in the main are not very competent in the intimate features of Polish literary culture and have no access to the Polish language. This volume presents some of the most penetrating commentaries on Miłosz’s œuvre by Polish critics. They illuminate both intrinsic poetic matters, such as the verse structure or the genre tradition, and the specific historic background of his poems, such as life under Nazi occupation. This comprehensive outline will be indispensable to anyone wanting to understand the real meaning of the often enigmatic writer and his, as Helen Vendler called it, Shakespearean breadth.

The questions the writer Samuel Beckett posed in his dramas, his prose and his poetry are the central questions asked by the most outstanding thinkers of modernity. Samuel Beckett, therefore, is the central figure in this book, but he is not alone. This study is not only a precise literary analysis, but it also traces transformations in terms of subjectivity and tries to conceptualize them. It universalizes the issues that emerge from the friction between the consciousness and the world, or, in other words, from the history of the struggle between the modern subject and that which negates: death, nothingness, the absence of meaning and the deception of living.

Gustaw Herling’s A World Apart is one of the most important books about Soviet camps and communist ideology in the Stalinist period. First published in English in 1951 and translated into many languages, it was relatively unknown till Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago in the 1970s. However, the narrative of the author’s experience in the Jertsevo gulag was highly appreciated by Bertrand Russell, Albert Camus, Jorge Semprun and others. In this first monograph on Herling’s fascinating life, Bolecki discusses hitherto unknown documents from the writer’s archive in Naples. His insight into the subject and poetics of Herling’s book and the account of its remarkable reception offer readers an intriguing profile of one of the most compelling witnesses of the 20th century.

Emotions as ‘the early form of knowledge about the surrounding world’ constitute a necessary component of the human psyche. Nevertheless, through the ages of the development of mankind, the emotional aspect was often regarded as a dispensable part of human nature, which should be fully ruled by reason. Despite the general opinion about the necessary control of reason over emotions, the possible participation of the latter in the human decision making processes was taken into consideration already in Antiquity. The dealing with the ethical aspect of emotions was one of the prevailing issues in the works of Euripides. In his tragedy of Phaedra the poet gives the broadest description of the process, which can be observed in a man afflicted with ‘emotional obsession’. The reception of this topos can also be considered in the tragedies of Roman philosopher Seneca, and modern French poet Jean Racine. This book was awarded as the best PhD thesis in culture field in Poland in 2009.

This book is a reconstruction and presentation of the fundamental assumptions of the so-called weak thought, as elaborated mainly by the Italian hermeneutical philosopher Gianni Vattimo and the Romanian philosopher Constantin Noica in his ontology. Both Noica and Vattimo focus on all that is existentially fragile, deficient, crippled or defective. The way in which weak being manifests itself can be best expressed by using the concept of the trace. Some motifs of weak thought serve to reinterpret certain fundamental concepts of poetics, firstly, the concept of mimesis, treated here as a kind of tracing, and secondly, the concept of the textual subject as a trace. The book also describes these tendencies in modern literature in which the intuition of weak being has most fully expressed itself. In general terms, this intuition is that of a reality that has lost its substantiality and essentiality. This intuition is most frequently expressed by the motif of the trace in its various different meanings: as the imprint, the remnant, the sign-message.

Over the last decades Clifford Geertz’ interpretive anthropology has played an important role in the field of socio-cultural anthropology. The study presents the critical reception of his thoughts in Western countries and Polish anthropology. Interpretive anthropology is based on the category of interpretation and the concept of thick description: the assumed indexical nature of reality and the possibility of unraveling its order through semiotic analysis has influenced the epistemological reflection in anthropology, the approach to theory, fieldwork and the research process.

Translation Studies has been in action in the Polish humanities since 1930s. The book gathers the most important contributions from Polish translation scholars working in the context of Literary and Cultural Studies as well as Linguistics. The essays offer insights into the conceptualisation of translation, stylistics and poetics, history and anthropology of translation. Most of them are made available in English for the first time. The editors’ introduction provides a panoramic backdrop for concepts, methodologies and applications. As part of the tendency to enlarge Translation Studies and include new contexts into its mainstream, this reader gives an overview of a rich area of translation scholarship from the centre of Europe, a crossroads of influences and traditions.

Critical revised edition and translation by Jean WardThis book presents a universal theory of autobiography, defined as a "triangular" form of utterance involving three different stances. It is a personal testimony to experiences lived through, a confession of intimate inner experience and a challenge addressed to the reader to engage in dialogue, enter into an argument or join in a game. The stances of witness, confession and challenge are always present, though usually one of them overshadows the other two. Polish memoirs, diaries and letters, as well as novels of a clearly personal character, are interpreted here in the context of the most important autobiographical texts of European literature. In the background, also, the historical events which have powerfully stamped Polish culture in the last two centuries are discreetly shown.

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.

This book presents a collection of essays discussing a history of the five myths of Dionysus, Narcissus, Prometheus, Marcolf, and Labyrinth in twentieth-century literature. The author traces their transformations against the wider backdrop of Polish and European literature. The book is an excellent, thought-provoking lesson in understanding the signs of contemporary culture and a fascinating journey through its complex trails.

This book presents the rhetorical means of creating discourses about a writer and examines how the critic’s viewpoint mediated via rhetoric tropes interplays with cultural institutions and their rules (newspaper criticism, university, schools). It eventually shows the place of literature in culture and the workings of cultural memory. The book studies rhetorics, discourse, and social psychology applied to cultural institutions. In this respect, it offers a completely innovative approach and method. The author also provides an exemplary study of the famous Polish modernist poet and writer Miron Białoszewski, and presents a detailed guide and an account of his way towards becoming a major figure in Polish culture.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the entirety of Wisława Szymborska’s poetic oeuvre. The author employs in-depth historical reflection on Szymborska’s beginnings to reveal that – without describing her post-war beginnings and reflecting on her early entanglement in socialist realist newspeak – Szymborska’s mature anti-dogmatic attitude will remain unclear. The book shows how Szymborska’s rhetoric and stylistics – figures of reservation, negation, contradiction, tautology, and repetition – are closely connected with the construction of the poetic world and affect the shape of her messages. After all, Wisława Szymborska is a poet of sophisticated wit, a surprising freedom of expression, and an unusual game with various literary styles, even with colloquial Polish.

The Persona of Czesław Miłosz considers the poetry of Miłosz in the innovative light of world literature and comparative literary studies. The author employs critical debates about Miłosz in American and English literature to reshape the image of his reception. The book masterfully elaborates Miłosz’s poetics of perspectivism with a new method of analysis based on the category of authorial persona—between reception, poetics, and close-reading—separate from the literary persona. Each chapter encapsulates introductory information about Polish literature and moves beyond the horizon of Western expectations about Central European writers. Miłosz’s most discussed poems reveal new provocative power in the context of T. S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, William Blake, and Friedrich Nietzsche.To date, no work comprehensively examines Miłosz’s self-proclaimed contradictory nature and the nomadic quality of his works. As a result, scholarship remains scattered in diverse areas of interest, moving Miłosz to the margins of world literature, instead of cherishing the diversity of perspectives he championed, among other places, in his Nobel Lecture. Without properly appreciating the poetics of contradiction proposed by Miłosz and a critical analysis of his process of self-situation, we narrow his impact on literature only to Polish poetry, effectively allowing for a petrification of his innovative methods. The Persona of Czesław Miłosz remedies this gap by revealing that, in contrast to Polish and American literary reception, Miłosz was an eccentric eulogist of the concept of a multi-perspectivist persona. Through close examinations of Miłosz’s poetry, we learn that he develops a method of oscillating between ideas in search of lasting symbols common to all, beginning unfailingly with his current perspective. After all, Miłosz persistently placed himself outside of the consensus and maneuvered the subject matter of his works to such an extent that his works became his philosophy of literature and the way of life.

The objective of this book is to continue the reflection on the innovative potential of misunderstanding in　cross-cultural encounters　which we started by publishing the first part of the book (Understanding Misunderstanding. Vol. 1: Cross-Cultural Translation, Peter Lang 2019). The main purpose of these two corresponding volumes is to embrace not only the cross-cultural adaptation of texts, ideas and discourses in distant geo-historical contexts, but also the culturally-based mechanisms of creatively transforming and re-shaping the source-text in target environments. The notions of misunderstanding and semantic transformation are seen as crucial in this process, yet still not widely acknowledged.

This book explores the covert and overt creative potential　of misunderstanding. Viewed from the authors’ perspective, misunderstanding proves an elementary and unavoidable aspect of linguistic and cultural communication that can have a surprisingly beneficial impact on social relations and concomitantly stimulate the emergence of new cultural forms. As the authors of the book prove, cross-cultural contact is definitely a dynamic and asymmetric process rather than a static and symmetric transfer of values from one culture to another.

The book depicts the phenomenon of cultural memory preserved in the Polish Romantic literature, predominantly in the works of Mickiewicz, Słowacki, and Norwid (and other European poets). The primary objective is to reconstruct the cultural pattern of continuity established in Poland during the period of catastrophe. The author describes the call for a critical historiography and presents a "Slavic counterpoint" in the history of modern Europe. The key questions of the book are: Will the Romantic lesson about the transformation of history into memory and turning the past into an object of faith turn out to be a lesson about the future? The book is inspired by the German trend of contemporary reflection – "the culture of remembrance" (Erinnerungskultur) founded on the works of the Assmanns.

This book is unique in both its subject matter and its approach. It focuses on the collaboration of J. Derrida, J.-F. Lyotard, J. Hillis Miller, D. Carroll, F. Jameson and others at the Critical Theory Institute at the University of California, Irvine and on the application of critical theory for the analysis of contemporary American visual art. The critical and philosophical analysis concerns the art of Bruce Nauman, Kosuth, Burden, Christo, Wodiczko, Johns, Rauschenberg, and others. The focus of the book is on irony and the sublime.The book also includes the original Prologue by G. van Den Abbeele (Dean of the School of Humanities at UC Irvine 2013-2018) on the history of Critical Theory in the United States, and at UCI, in particular. The CTI’s uniqueness consisted in it being one of the best centers of the Critical Theory studies in the United States.

The book is the first systematic study of the beginnings of psychoanalysis on Polish lands in Galicia (Austria-Hungary) and Congress Poland (Russia) during the partitions of Poland in the years between 1900 and 1918. The birth of the movement was presented on a broad cultural background, as an element of the assimilation processes among Polish Jews. At the same time, Freud's and Jung's theories began to gain popularity in Polish medical, philosophical, artistic and literary circles. By 1918, over a dozen articles on psychoanalysis had been published in Polish scientific and philosophical journals. Freud himself was vitally interested in this process, sending Ludwig Jekels to Krakow in the role of – as he wrote – an "apostle" of his theory in the circles of the Polish intelligentsia.

This book discusses the direction of changes in contemporary culture at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries in Poland on the example of mutual relationships between literature and the media, such as film, radio, TV and the Internet. The interdisciplinary approach adopted by the author combines literary and media studies with the perspectives of social communication, anthropology and sociology of culture. The book focuses on topics such as reconfiguration of culture, expansion of the media, situation of literature and the central place of audio-visual parallels (auteur film, TV series, PC games). The author notes that both literature and the media are situated between art and communication today and both share the meta-cultural role of natural languages.

The book describes the system of communist censorship in Poland in the years 1948–1958, as well as its effects on the development of literature. It is the first literary studies work which takes up the subject in such broad and systematic terms. The book is divided into three main parts: an attempt at synthesis (theory and practice of censorship), special cases (censorship of specific writers), authorial strategies (the authors’ ways of dealing with censorship) and contexts.The most important conclusion which can be drawn from the research is that out of many small changes emerges an image of a very significant one. Numerous small cuts and alterations build up to an image of Polish literature of the 1940s and 1950s as a whole. A whole that was always dependant on and subservient to politics.

The book contains essays on the heterogeneity of Polish Romantic literature and its links with Europe’s cultural heritage. The essays deal with, among other topics, the idea of beauty and truth, correspondences between the arts, the role of tradition and memory in the Romantic era, and the significance of mysticism and irony. The authors of the essays write about such seemingly distant issues as music and revolution in Chopin’s times, and travel to places as disparate as Siberia and Italy. Their thematically diverse reflections are linked by questions they pose about the romantic roots of today’s Europe. The works of Mickiewicz and other Romantic poets discussed in this book thus clearly do not concern merely the past, but also speak to the present day, describing the experiences of everyday life in its various dimensions.

Tomasz Garbol’s book reconstructs Czesław Miłosz’s poetic vision of the world after the Fall. The entry point to this approach is the conviction about the ambivalence of previous interpretations of Miłosz’s works, especially about his bipolar poetic worldview (his intellectual and existential division between pessimism and ecstasy) and his understanding of the consequences of the Fall (reversible or fatalistic). The book is a literary studies take on the relationship between literature and religion. The main direction is that Miłosz’s main need in art comes from his yearning for contact with the meaning of reality, which he seeks in the activity of poetic imagination.

Maciej Nowak’s book is the first monograph on the writings of Andrzej Bobkowski (1913–1961), a Polish émigré writer from the millieu of Jerzy Giedroyc’s Kultura journal. Bobkowski is famous for his diary Wartime Notebooks: France 1940–1944, translated into many languages, including English. Using current methods of the French school in the study of diaristics and epistolography, Nowak overcomes the limits of aesthetic analysis to reach the anthropological center of Bobkowski’s authorial practices. In this way, Nowak unveils the existential and axiological dimension of Bobkowski’s work. Thus, the book offers a coherent depiction of the rich and diverse writings of Bobkowski, prepared with methods of modern humanities.

The monograph presents the Polish history of haiku and the forms associated with this genre – in literature and visual arts. Polish works are confronted with Japanese poetry (along with its aesthetic, philosophical and ethical contexts) and with haiku-inspired miniatures produced by poets from various European and American countries. The book also touches upon the theory of literary genres and translatological problems (translations of Japanese haiku as a touchstone of changes in Western literature). The presented discussion with haiku as the central theme allows for a unique and panoramic perspective of Polish poetry of the last hundred years. It also facilitates original analyses of the relationship between literature and visual arts – in the field of book art, painting and multimedia.

Is the prose poem revolutionary and subversive, or marginal and lyrical? What makes a piece of prose a prose poem? Is its identity vague or precisely defined? Can every poem written in prose be considered a prose poem, a form influenced by the brilliant invention of French literature and by authors such as Baudelaire or Rimbaud? Agnieszka Kluba discusses the prose poem by providing a comprehensive summary of the existing approaches to it, but also by proposing an original conception of this form of writing. Kluba does not limit herself to considerations within literary genre theory and remains close to the poetic texts she considers. Following the intricate line of the prose poem, in Polish and European literature, she carefully assigns to prose poetry a place in Modern literary history.