Poeci-tłumacze jako „awangarda” lat 90.

Poets-Translators as the “Avant-Garde” of the 1990s David Lehman in his book The Last Avant-Garde. The Making of the New York School of Poets sustains the avant-garde character of the New York School (painters and poets), pointing to the resistance of the public to their works as to one of the symptoms showing their anti-normative and emancipatory message. New experimental poetry in post-transformational Poland of the 1990s was, in general, following the innovations of foreign neo-avant-garde practices – in respect to the methods, interests, and creative ideas. The New York School tradition became the main source of inspiration, due to its reception by poets-translators of the circle of “Literatura na Świecie” magazine: Piotr Sommer, Bohdan Zadura, Andrzej Sosnowski, and Tadeusz Pióro. This article shows that their literary statements on art, which could be seen as programmatic in the avant- -garde way, displayed certain outlines similar to the New York School ideas. One might risk the thesis that at the turn of the centuries in Poland not only American neo-avant-garde poetry aroused the interest of Polish poets-translators. Also the programme of the New York School poets, however vague, became important for their experience and it was being “translated” alongside the poems, though its features would turn out different in Polish conditions.

Wspólnoty kobiet w pisarstwie i życiu Anny Kowalskiej

Women’s Communities in the Writing and Life of Anna Kowalska The article is devoted to the writing and biography of Anna Kowalska. The first part discusses the shared home of Maria Dąbrowska and Anna Kowalska, in which women hired as housekeepers played a vital role. Then the article briefly analyses Kowalska’s novel Safona (Sappho), which depicts the aging Greek female poet surrounded by her young protégées. The main focus is, however, on the novel Gruce (The Gruca family), co-published in 1936 by Anna Kowalska and her husband, Jerzy Kowalski. The novel was heavily revised by Kowalska and reprinted in 1961, and then in 1968. One of the side motifs of this vast work explores a women’s agricultural cooperative in a village near Lviv in the second half of the 1930s. The utopian projects of feminism and cooperativism are criticised here, while the entire novel fits in the “dark” formula of psychological and social (“populist” in the language of the era) realism, characteristic of that decade.

Kobiecość a płeć żeńska. Komediopisarki dwudziestolecia międzywojennego wobec dyskursu emancypacyjnego

Femininity and the Female Gender: Female Comedy Writers of the Interwar Period in Relation to the Emancipation Discourse The article presents an analysis of selected interwar comedies written by women – Marcelina Grabowska, Maria Morozowicz-Szczepkowska, Maria Pawlikowska- -Jasnorzewska and Magdalena Samozwaniec – and dealing with issues related to the emancipation discourse: motherhood, abortion, shaping a new female role model, and relationships in women’s groups. The heroines of those plays, increasingly liberated and self-aware, demanded the rights traditionally assigned to men, while trying to free themselves from widespread stereotypes. The authors of the dramatic works used various comedic techniques and traditions: satirical, ludic, or Young Poland’s “black comedy.” Comedy influenced the construction of the depicted world and its individual elements as well as the linguistic forms. The amusing heroines became negative characters, going beyond the limits of femininity accepted by the society or postulated by the authors, and their awkwardness evoked compassion in the audience or revealed the malfunctioning of social institutions.

Polskie Stowarzyszenie Równouprawnienia Kobiet (1907–1914) w świetle relacji autobiograficznych, prasy kobiecej i historiografii feministycznej

Polish Association of Equal Rights for Women (1907–1914) in the Light of Autobiographical Relations, Women’s Press and Feminist Historiography The text investigates the history of the Polish Association of Equal Rights for Women (1907–1914) – one of the first legal feminist organisations in the Kingdom of Poland. The Association was the product of ideological and social clashes within the environment of the emancipationists gathered at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries around Paulina Kuczalska-Reinschmit, the leader of Polish suffragettes. The group was organised around the Women’s Labour Circle attached to The Society for Support of Industry and Trade (1894–1905), and then in the informal Polish Union of Equal Rights for Women. In 1907 the suffragettes formed the Union of Equal Rights for Polish Women, and the proponents of the integration of the fight for gender equality and Polish independence established the Polish Association of Equal Rights for Women. The relations between the Union and the Association were characterised by competition for succeeding in being the first to introduce new ideas into the mainstream and good practices inside the organization.

Poezja i obraz, piśmienność i wizualność od 1989 roku

Poetry and Image, Literacy and Visuality after 1989 The article traces the history of the relationship between linguistic (textual, verbal, discursive) elements and graphic, visual, and pictorial elements in Polish poetry after 1989. The subject of interest here are various phenomena, such as: artistic books (by Natalia Malek, Kira Pietrek, and Justyna Bargielska), reference to painting/film/ photography, experiments with visual and verbal representation, using a language mark/text by visual artists. The goal is not so much to catalog the relationships between text and image, but to describe the difference between artistic activities in the era of intermedia (twentieth-century avant-garde) and artistic activities in the era of transmedia.

Druga płeć awangardy? O książce Płeć awangardy

Other Gender of Avant-Garde? On the Book Płeć awangardy The book Płeć awangardy [Gender of the Avant-Garde] is the first attempt of this kind at a comprehensive, gender-oriented presentation of the avant-garde tradition in Polish literary studies. The review of the volume starts with an outline of its place in the worldwide humanities, especially in the face of the increasingly dynamic development of women’s studies on the avant-garde. Individual texts are slightly different from the editorial introduction and its assumptions: a materialistic attempt to reclaim and reestablish feminism in the heart of the avant-garde. Thus, they are presented as a result of a meeting of several methodological schools with clear patronages at the University of Silesia: art historians, literary historians, literary critics, representatives of men’s studies, women’s studies, feminism and gender studies. Despite the political background of many of them, connected with avant-garde ideas of social and aesthetic emancipation, it is easy to see how far their dictionaries have diverged from each other and how difficult it is now to meet and establish a common understanding of basic concepts such as avant-garde, sex/gender or even political engagement.

Niewspółczesność. O możliwej historii literatury polskiej po 1989 roku

Noncontemporaneity. On the Possible History of Polish Literature after 1989 Temporal and historical frames usually applied to the description of recent Polish literature gradually lose their potential. “Postmodernism,” “late modernism,” and other terms do not reveal the complicated and local temporal landscape of this literature. Processes like the traumatic return of past events (WWII, the Holocaust, Stalinist terror), the simultaneous activity of Polish language writers in countries around the world, immigrant writings, etc., preclude the use of the term “contemporaneity,” since they do not create any shared temporal horizon and belong to processes of different temporal dynamics with separate time rhythms. Rather, they belong to the dimension of “noncontemporaneity” or “asynchrony.” “Noncontemporaneity” is both the general perspective of the latest literature and the experience of the main characters presented by the literary works.

Jakieś dziwne przeczucie, jak przed świata końcem. Argumenty za nową cezurą

A Weird Inkling, As If the World Was Ending. Arguments for a New Periodisation The article examines the idea of year 2008 – the beginning of the so-called Great Recession – as a potential turning point in contemporary Polish poetry. Most of the authors commonly associated with the so-called “new Polish political poetry” have published their first books around 2008, and it was also around that year that the work of certain important young authors seems to have shifted from a relatively traditional form to a more experimental one, allowing them to accurately grasp the anxiety and precariousness inherently tied to the social experience of the young generation. I link these shifts to the issue of reference and dereferentialisation of sign/language under financial capitalism. Whereas pre-2008, the dereferentialisation of language might have seemed like an ongoing and somewhat ambivalent process, for the young generation it constitutes the very foundation of their everyday existence.

Izochimeny i literatura. O książce Magdaleny Koch Mistrzynie myślenia. Serbski esej feministyczny (XIX−XXI wiek)

Concept of Isochimes and Literature. On Magdalena Koch’s Book Mistrzynie myślenia. Serbski esej feministyczny (XIX−XXI wiek) This article presents Mistrzynie myślenia Serbski esej feministyczny (XIX−XXI wiek) [Woman Intellectual Mentors: The Serbian Feminist Essay (From the 19th to the 20thCentury)], a book by Magdalena Koch. This is a significant monograph that clarifies the role and place of women in Serbian literature and culture, as well as the essay as an important tool in the process of emancipation of Serbian women. Polish researcher provides a diachronic panorama of the genre over the past two centuries. The book’s crucial point is its focus on the clear presence of the tradition of the feminist essay in the cultural space in Serbia.

Od natury do kultury… i z powrotem? O książce Biopolityka męskości

From Nature to Culture… and Back? On the Book Biopolityka męskości The paper is a review of the co-authorship book entitled Biopolityka męskości [Biopolitics of Manhood]. The author notices that this scientific monograph locates the Polish masculinities studies on the new field of biopolitics, immunisation and tanatopolitics, giving a hope to elaborate an alternative methodology of studies on literature and culture of this range. The author appreciates researchers’ achievements and suggests a few contexts expanding their reflections. Both the prior conference and subjective publication, in author’s opinion, open the new chapter of the Polish men’s studies.