“Real life is elsewhere, but we are here”

The text discusses the last volume of Adam Zagajewski's poetry, entitled “Real Life” (Krakow 2019). The author of the review presents in detail three main themes present in this book: nostalgic farewells, records of the inevitable end (existence coming to death) and poetic epiphanies (rare moments of happiness). An important context of the analyzes presented in the text is an intertextual dimension of Adam Zagajewski's poetry, the dialogue dealing with his great predecessors: Czesław Miłosz, Paul Celan, Tomasz Mann and T.S. Eliot.

A few words on Olga Tokarczuk’s The Land of Metaxy

In her volume of essays The Tender Narrator, Olga Tokarczuk devotes one of them to The Land of Metaxy, which she calls – following Plato – a place between the world of humans and the world of gods. The status of this place is peculiar: it mediates between the worlds, and yet does not belong to either. It is from that place that characters come to the writer. An attempt to explain the actual meaning of Metaxy and who its inhabitants are boils down to four possible interpretations. We can analyse Metaxy in accordance with contemporary quantum physics and cosmology (parallel worlds), from the perspective of religious models created by the civilization of the West, according to the astrology of astral planes, and finally as a domain of collective unconscious, in accordance with Carl Gustav Jung’s analytic psychology and Stanislav Grof’s transpersonal psychology.

Buchnąć z futrówy, odpypić z ponsy – about vocabulary from the category „cheating” in student jargon from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries

The article presents the history of the student jargon. The author describes the vocabulary used in the period: second-half the 19th century – first half the 20th century; the lexis belongs to the thematic category „cheating”. In the text the reader gets to know theses: 1) the lexis discussed is the root cause of one of the most extensive lexical-semantic categories of the student jargon in the post-partition period (after the period of the Partitions of Poland); 2) in former student language a shared store of the vocabulary exists – this group is independent of the administrative dependence of schools; 3) we notice much former vocabulary in the contemporary jargon; 4) we will notice jargon words in the general Polish in the 19th century; 7) we can see the participation of criminal jargon from the 19th century.

Where to limit the freedom of speech? Analysis in the context of the First Amendment to the US Constitution and the fighting words doctrine

This article is about the limits of the right to free speech. The first section provides a brief introduction to this topic, primarily in the context of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The second section describes the case of Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, which was fundamental to the topic of this paper because the United States Supreme Court created the so-called "fighting words" doctrine based on it. In the next two sections, two court cases are presented that perfectly demonstrate the limits of the right to free speech in the United States: Snyder v. Phelps and Village of Skokie v. National Socialist Party of America. The fifth part shows the right to freedom of speech in the context of Polish civil, criminal, and constitutional law, as well as acts of international law binding on Poland. The last part is a short summary.

The image of a modern shaman. A literary example of Ida Brzezińska

The shaman figure is most often associated with primitive communities, inhabiting, among others Siberia. The shaman plays one of the most important roles in them - he is an intermediary between the world of people and the world of spirits. Responds to, among others for the safe passage of souls to the other side and protects her from evil spirits. However, is there room for representatives of this institution in contemporary Polish popular literature? How would they find themselves in the 21st century? The article aims to show the interpretation of the shaman on the example of Ida Brzezińska, the heroine of the books of Martyna Raduchowska. I intend to introduce the role and functions of the „shaman from the dead”, juxtaposing the way Ida works (including reading sleepy margins from a rather unusual dream catcher, carrying out souls and the consequences that await in the event of failure or making contact with the dead) with the methods described by scholars shamans. The purpose of the work is to show how much Raduchowska tried to adapt shamanism in her work by modernizing it, and how many elements she added from herself to make the story more attractive.

The dehumanized take revenge (A few reflections and a lot of excerpts from Dorota Kotas Sugars)

[The text is a review of the book: Dorota Kotas, Sugars, Wydawnictwo Cyranka, Warszawa 2021, p. 196.]

Molise Croats and the pandemic

During the coronavirus pandemic, the Molise Croats intensified their presence in social media, in which they show activities to preserve the language, traditions and culture of their ancestors. At that time, new literary works were created, including refer to pandemic times. They based their newly created epidemic vocabulary mainly in Italian.

Alpinist adaptive potential and the dynamics of adaptation in Janusz Klarner’s „Nanda Devi”

Alpinist expedition to the Nanda Devi was the first Polish successfully ended hiking in the Himalaya. Nanda Devi was a very tough challenge for Polish team but after many dangerous situations they finally reached the peak. As a next step alpinists wanted to reach Tirsuli peak. Unluckily, two of the expeditors were buried in an avalanche on the slopes of a glacier. Janusz Klarner (the member of the Polish alpinists team) after few years wrote a book Nanda Devi which is based on his private expedition journal. The main thesis of the article is that reaching Nanda Devi was possible by the accurate speed of adaptation. The Himalaya was a completely different and unknown place for Polish alpinists. Alpinists were forced to various adaptations in many different situations. In the article author analyses emerging changes and adaptations. Among them are symbolic, cultural, technical and axiological adaptations. Using Deleuze's findings from Bergsonizm, the author recognizes that the capacity for appropriately dynamic adaptation is the result of an appropriate arrangement occurring at a point in time. To sum up, an author considers various connections between cultural patterns, personal causality and environmental considerations.

English modal constructions ‘must HAVE DONE’ and intermediate modals in authentic context of use ‒ a case study

The aim of the present paper is to examine the degree to which the first year students of English philology at ATH in Bielsko-Biala are able to recognize the particular modal constructions occurring in authentic linguistic materials, after having been introduced to their forms and meanings theoretically. The paper focuses on contextualization by means of linguistic corpora of selected English modal constructions, such as the perfective use of central modals on the example of ‘must HAVE done’, and particular ‘intermediate’ modals (1. must have; 2. dare + bare infinitive; 3. WE/I shall; 4. BE about to; 5. BE to; 6. HAVE got to; 7. BE bound to; 8. BE willing to; 9. HAPPEN to), following a remote lecture on descriptive grammar of the English language via the MS Teams application during the coronavirus lockdown in January, 2021. The case study concerns the results obtained from an assignment administered to 64 first year students, presented in four tables. The assignment, attached in the form of an MS Word file to edit, required the students to select and cite from either of the two corpora of the English language – BNC or COCA – examples of authentic use of each of the modal constructions studied during one of the lectures. The paper consists of six sections, two on the main theses in cognitive linguistics, whose achievements pertain to usage-based acquisition of new linguistic material, three parts related to the research conducted, including the methodological part, an analysis of the results obtained, followed by a discussion and general conclusions. The last section signals how selected theses of cognitive linguistics apply to the results of the said research.

Humanities after ZOZO

[Introduction to the volume entitled: Humanities after ZOZO (2021, No. 2 [37]). The issue is dedicated to Professor Anna Węgrzyniak on the occasion of the anniversary.]