Krew i brud. Uwagi na temat estetyki oraz poetyki opisów śmierci w cyklu o wiedźminie Andrzeja Sapkowskiego

Andrzej Sapkowski’s The Witcher series is the first Polish fantasy series that has gained so much popularity. When Sapkowski published his first story — The Witcher — in 1986, fantasy literature wasn’t well-known in Poland. In fact Polish readers, who were interested in fantasy, would mainly know John R.R. Tolkien’s novels like The Hobbit, Or Thete and Back Again, The Lord of the Rings or Silmarillion, all belonging to mythopoeic fantasy. Sapkowski’s story was vastly different from them, because the Polish author referred to sword and sorcery literature, which at that time was little-known in Poland. He created an interesting protagonist and a dark, vicious world, full of violence and graphic descriptions of death. It appears that one of the main factors having an influence on the huge popularity of the series, may be the attempt to shock the reader by using a unique construction of the presented world, which contains a lot of graphic violent imagery. This article presents those methods of description of death and violence in The Witcher series to present why they are so interesting to the readers and what makes them stand out from the rest of similar descriptions in Polish fantasy literature. The analysis is divided into several parts. The first part presents the influence of Sapkowski’s debut story on Polish fantasy literature. The second part contains the analysis of the dynamics of descriptions of death. The third and the fourth focus on showing the individualisation of death in The Witcher series and on detail exposure. The next part presents the narrative treatments used by Sapkowski to increase the impact of the literary images of death, for example changes of a narrative perspective. The last part of the article presents naturalistic elements of the descriptions and explains what functions they perform in the text.

Racial Capitalism and the Informatics of Value

This article takes the presentation of mechanical and informatic models in Samuel Delany's Neveryóna as an occasion to examine the relations of force, abstraction, information, and differential valuation that constitute racial capitalism. In order to do this, the article considers the continuities and divergences between the principles those models demonstrate, the lessons on value and economic determination that precede them, and Delany's subsequent presentation of surplus populations, intricated “free” and slave labor, and the modes of racialized differentiation that shape and are shaped in the interstices of those social formations. In Delany's sword-and-sorcery bildungsroman, the models illustrate the abstract logic of value, show that logic to be informatic in character, and point toward a dialectical relationship between this informatic logic and the concrete practices of dispossession that produce and operate through ascriptive race and gender regimes. Value's abstract operations are too often understood to be incommensurable with such regimes, yet Delany's presentation deploys the language and processes associated with informatics to reveal an essential relationship between the abstract network that results from value's mediating function and the modes of ascription and concrete violence that, as a result of such mediation, tend to be associated with precapitalist or noncapitalist social formations.

From Conan the Barbarian to Gunan il guerriero: Re-contextualizing spaghetti sword and sorcery

The release of Conan the Barbarian (1982) played a crucial role in the emergence of the sword and sorcery film, a subgenre of fantasy cinema featuring muscular heroes in violent conflict with wizards and other supernatural creatures. Italian genre filmmakers attempted to capitalize on the international popularity of sword and sorcery by quickly producing a number of low-budget films, which emulated the stylistic and narrative features of Conan. Over a period of six years, between 1982 and 1987, the Italian film industry produced almost two dozen sword and sorcery films, which achieved mixed results at the box office. Although recently an increasing number of international film scholars have focused on the critical examination of Italian genre cinema, to date, little attention has been devoted to the study of Italian sword and sorcery. By examining the aesthetic features of four Italian sword and sorcery films (Gunan il guerriero [1982], Ator l’invincibile [1982], Hercules [1983] and The Barbarians [1987]), as well as their modes of production and distribution, this article proposes the first comprehensive critical examination of this filone.

Robert Ervin Howard’s Vision of the Supernatural in Beyond the Black River

The plot and the presented world of Robert Ervin Howard’s Beyond the Black River are representative of sword and sorcery, a subgenre of fantasy fiction that Howard is claimed to have pioneered. It has been proposed that the worlds in fantasy fiction are coherently organised, natural, and material. Nevertheless, supernatural elements that are not consis-tent with the structure of the universe are present. The struggle between the structured worlds and the chaotic supernatural that is resolved by an intervention of a barbarian hero constitute the essence of the sword and sorcery subgenre. These elements can also be found in Beyond the Black River by Howard, who employs contrastive images to present the super-natural.

Między wzniosłością a upodleniem. Obrazowanie oraz znaczenie śmierci w fantasy przygodowej i mitopoetyckiej

Literary images and functions of death in sword and sorcery and mythopoeic fantasyThis article presents and compares methods of description of death in two primary variants of fantasy literature: sword and sorcery and mythopoeic fantasy. The focus is on works of the precursors of fantasy literature — Robert E. Howard Conan the Barbarian series and John R.R. Tolkien The Lord of the Rings, Silmarillion, and texts of authors who creatively developed two primary types of fantasy literature — Fritz Leiber Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser cycle and Ursula K. Le Guin Earthsea cycle.The analysis is divided into two parts. The first one describes methods of presentation of death and their functions in sword and sorcery literature. In this variant of fantasy many literary images of death can be found, which focus particularly on its biological aspects. The next part shows analogical elements in mythopoeic fantasy, where the descriptions of death are inspired by the medieval chansons de geste.The article shows important differences between methods of presenting of death in sword and sorcery and mythopoeic fantasy and between functions of death in this two primary types of fantasy literature. In sword and sorcery the descriptions of death have great importance in the adventure plot structure, because they are connected with activities and adventures of the main character. In mythopoeic fantasy the kind of a character’s death often shows moral condition of this character. Moreover, death in mythopoeic fantasy is important for the balance and stability of created world.

The “Facts” of Blackness and Anthropological Worlds

This chapter discusses the origins and development of sword and sorcery in the pulps and fanzines of the 1930s. It starts with Robert Howard’s Conan the Barbarian stories and reads these stories in relation to contemporaneous fanzine commentary. show an intricate process of worldbuilding whereby race is located at higher and higher levels of meaning even though its correspondence with actual “races” is deeply questioned. This interpretive strategy mirrors the work of cultural anthropologists who were critiquing biological racism, thus demonstrating that race was not so much being critiqued as it was being elevated to a different order of meaning. It details these interpretive strategies in order to show the simultaneous reproduction of race in the building of sword and sorcery as a genre with the embedding of race in anthropological thought.

Fantasies of Blackness and Racial Capitalism

This chapter traces sword and sorcery’s re-emergence as a popular genre in the 1960s and 1970s during the era of U.S. Civil Rights movements. It shows how strategies for reproducing racism despite changing political sensibilities are constructed through the genre of sword and sorcery. These strategies go hand in hand with soon-to-be dominant re-imaginations of free market economics by economists such as Milton Friedman and Gary Becker. The chapter analyzes the work on the economics of discrimination in relation to Samuel Delany’s use of sword and sorcery to reflect on how race gets used to imagine market processes. Delany’s Nevèrÿon series adds another dimension to understandings of racial capitalism by focusing on race as economic utility.

Cultural Engineering: A Theme in Science Fiction

As a form, science fiction conceals homogeneity beneath apparent diversity. The diversity can be seen by looking at the range of paperbacks in any bookshop. One finds lumped together ‘end of the world’ stories, galactic empire stories, stories of the near future and, via time travel, of the very far past, as well as stories that have nothing to do with science at all but depend on magic, or the fantasy type known as ‘sword and sorcery’. One might well think that the inclusion of all these under one heading is just a mistake, that the diversity is genuine. There are two reasons for thinking that is not so: that there is something holding all this diversity together. One is temporary and practical; the other is an element that regular readers recognise, something that forms a large part of the genre’s appeal....