Inspired by the spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences,Mapping Warsawis an interdisciplinary study that combines urban studies, cinema studies, cultural studies, history, literature, and ...photography. It examines Warsaw's post-World War II reconstruction through images and language.Juxtaposing close readings of photo books, socialist-era newsreels called the Polska Kronika Filmowa, the comedies of Leonard Buczkowski and Jan Fethke, the writing and films of Tadeusz Konwicki, and a case study on the Palace of Culture and Science-a "gift" from none other than Stalin-this study investigates the rhetorical and visual, rather than physical, reconstruction of Warsaw in various medias and genres.Ewa Wampuszyc roots her analysis in the historical context of the postwar decade and shows how and why Poland's capital became an essential part of a propaganda program inspired by communist ideology and the needs of a newly established socialist People's Republic.Mapping Warsawdemonstrates how physical space manifests itself in culture, and how culture, history, and politics leave an indelible mark on places. It points out ways in which we take for granted our perception of space and the meanings we assign to it.
This article analyzes the magical realist mode of writing in two novels by Polish author Olga Tokarczuk: Primeval and Other Times (1996) and House of Day, House of Night (1998). While Tokarczuk ...herself rejects the label “magical realism,” her novels exhibit such key magical realist characteristics as disruption of rationally ordered time and space, the rejection of dominant historical and cultural narratives, an exploration of alternate epistemological forms of inquiry, and literalization of language, metaphor, and imagination. In Primeval, Tokarczuk presents a world that exists at the intersection between cyclical (mythical) and linear times; in House the novel asserts historical order through the dominance of space over time. In both novels, Tokarczuk’s poetics of the Word (Logos) becomes key to establishing a sense of magical realism in the texts. By using these and other magical realist narrative techniques, Tokarczuk deftly questions dominant discourses of Polish history and culture, such as that of the “Recovered Territories” or the power of religious faith. The presence of the magical realist mode in Tokarczuk’s work has important implications for the study of magical realism in general and Polish literary studies in particular.
Tadeusz Konwicki’s literary and cinematic treatment of the Palace of Culture and Science has had a significant influence on the perception and meaning of this Stalinist edifice. In his novels, ...Wniebowstąpienie Ascension (1967) and A Minor Apocalypse (1979), Konwicki uses the Palace as a means of critiquing communist ideology by adopting a Christian discourse that, in turn, invokes and questions the Polish Romantic messianic and martyrological tradition. In the 1989 film Lawa: Opowieść o “Dziadach” Adama Mickiewicza, Konwicki’s presentation of the Palace visually explodes into what seems to be the author’s “final” statement on the signification of the Palace. By examining the poetics of the Palace of Culture in Wniebowstąpienie, A Minor Apocalypse, and Lawa, this essay considers how over a period of twenty years Konwicki appropriated the meaning of the Palace by playing on the tension between the intended original signification of the building (as a Stalinist structure) and its function as a dynamic edifice that could be redefined in a localized (Polish), urban (Varsovian), and historical context.
Warsaw 2013 Blobaum, Robert; Holmgren, Beth; Wampuszyc, Ewa V
East European politics and societies,
05/2013, Letnik:
27, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
For the vast majority of Americans, the mention of Warsaw conjures up images of the Holocaust and World War II. In comparison with other Central European capitals such as Berlin, Budapest, Prague, ...and Vienna, Warsaw remains fixed as a site of wartime suffering and destruction in English-language publications. In part, these impressions stem from the fact that interwar Warsaw was a major center of Ashkenazi Jewish culture, and stories of this center’s flourishing and destruction attract the largest number of American readers. Because the Holocaust relentlessly reduced this Jewish center to a ghetto and then a ghost town, tributes to the Polish Jewish dead and memoirs of the Holocaust’s survivors naturally dominate Englishlanguage tales of the city.
Narrating Migration Wampuszyc, Ewa V
The Sarmatian review,
2014, Letnik:
XXXIV, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Druga płeć na wygnaniu: Doświadczenie migracyjne w opowieści powojennych pisarek polskich (The Second Sex in Exile: Migration Experiences in Narratives of Postwar Polish Female Writers), by Bożena ...Karwowska. Kraków: TAiWPN Universitas, 2013. 268 pages. Index, footnotes. ISBN 97883-242-2289-6 (paperback); ISBN 97883-242-1908-7 (ebook). In Polish.
New York’s Empire State Building. The Tower of London. Paris’s Arc de Triomphe. Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate. Warsaw’s Palace of Culture and Science? Is it possible that for Poland’s capital this “gift ...from the Soviet peoples narody to the Polish people naród” belongs on the list of internationally recognizable architectural symbols? According to polls taken in 2013 byGazeta Stołeczna(The Capital Newspaper), the Palace of Culture and Science (Pa³ac Kultury i Nauki) is the architectural object most recognized and most likely to be remembered by foreign tourists visiting Warsaw.¹ Despite its prominence in the city center, however, some insist that
INTRODUCTION Ewa Wampuszyc
Mapping Warsaw,
10/2018
Book Chapter
The story of postwar Warsaw is not only a story of reconstructing the city’s physical topography after being nearly destroyed during World War II, but also its discursive topography.¹ It is a story ...as much about the physical space of the Polish capital as it is about the meaning attached to Warsaw’s reconstruction and the way this was collectively understood, embraced, rejected, or contested. At its core it is a story about the expressive capabilities of verbal and visual texts to render spatiality. Warsaw’s discursive topography was in a state of transition after the war, prime for its own “reconstruction”
The newsreel, a “potpourri of motion picture news footage,” is an audiovisual artifact of the past.¹ The mere idea of the newsreel takes us back to an earlier era when the connection between the ...moving image, news, and its consumption by viewers was mediated by time and distance from the events it reported. A popular form of disseminating news in the United States and across Europe beginning in the first decades of the twentieth century, newsreels were limited to movie theaters, were screened prior to scheduled feature films, and were often secondary to the main attraction and audience interest.
In
