The work experience of literary heroes from the generation of „Tekstylia” and the question of autobiography The main purpose of this article is to present the work experience of literary ...protagonists, who are the representatives of „Tekstylia” generation – people born in the seventies and early eighties, thus the generation, which after years of Polish prosperity in the nineties had to confront brutal capitalist reality at the turn of the XX and XXI century. In my opinion, the work experience of these writers is reflected in plots of their books, where main characters are forced to confront Polish even more brutal capitalist reality at the turn of the XX and XXI century, working as bank assistants, copywriters or tabloid newspaper’s journalists. Corporate enslavement and unfeeling, deprived of empathy managers, constitute main themes of analyzed works, therefore, primarily, I devote my attention to these exact issues.
This article takes a look at contemporary Polish prose dealing with theme of the Shoah. “Contemporary”, in this case, means fiction published in the 1990s and after the year 2000, thus already in the ...twenty-first century. It therefore comprises the last twenty-five years. The fundamental categories used here in the analyses of texts, are the memory and post-memory of the Shoah. The authors who have published works over the last twenty five years have either been witnesses of these events (i.e. Children of the Holocaust), or – more often – representatives of the second or third generation after the Shoah. In this article, contemporary Polish fiction will be exemplified by the prose of Marek Bieńczyk, Piotr Szewc, Igor Ostachowicz, Mariusz Sieniewicz and Piotr Paziński. Analysis contains four categories which structure both the world represented and the form of the prose: transgression, pop-culture, history and metonymy.
The article analyses myths concerning menstruation in Izabela Filipiak’s and Olga Tokarczuk’s creative works. The writers refer to female physiology in order to abolish the taboo on the female body ...and its excretions and to create mythology free from the male universe. Menstruation is considered a taboo subject even at the beginning of the 21st century and this physiological aspect of feminity is connected with an attempt to respect the differences between the sexes. One can observe not so much an attempt to destroy the rules of patriarchal culture, but a need to recreate the Western imagination, which is able to renew social and symbolic order and create new female mythology, which enables women to identify with their own needs, feelings, physical, sexual and erotic experiences.
The presented reflections constitute an attempt to decipher the 20th century history recorded in written statements by one chosen aspect of the (post-)war trauma, that is, architecture and related ...spatial practices. The objective of this articles is to depict main models of perception and the description of urban spaces, as well as models recorded in contemporary literature and those that are a textual formula for the experience exceeding beyond the architectural-aesthetic dimension towards a political, cultural and social reflection. The reading of contemporary Polish literature leads through a matter from which the textual description of cities is built to an actual matter--to the building material of both the 20th century architectural and historical landscapes. The culture of burghers, which has introduced the tenement house life (including that fictional) into the Polish experience so late and for such a short time, has soon found an epilogue in the shape of a brick torn from a building and the (anti-) aesthetics of post-war ruins. The trauma (also the spatial one), the annihilation of cities, including the most significant--Warsaw, is verbalized in anti-fictional forms of anti-diaries, whose authors often are residents of symbols of reconstruction, socialism, and oblivion, erected after the war--districts of slab block housing estates that "block" with their cement weight the access to what is hidden beneath the lawns - the trauma. The author proposes to specify out of the former century three types of urban perception, treated here conventionally, whose symbols are: a tenement house/ ruin and the construction material characteristic of Polish dilapidated buildings, i.e., a brick; post-war complexes, both institutional and residential, constructed from giant concrete slabs; lastly, stones of Western Europe seen with the eyes of a "barbarian" from beyond the Iron Curtain--a synonym of aesthetization of the observed reality. Key Word surban studies; history of architecture; urban anthropology; the 20th century experience; contemporary Polish prose
The essay presents an overview of the most important and most interesting prose and poetry publications that appeared on the Polish publishing market in 2019. The past year belonged mainly to artists ...perfectly rooted in the readers’ awareness. Particularly appreciated were especially works with underlying autobiographical themes, revisiting the often difficult past to try to sort out the “here and now”, socially engaged books, and books that remind us about shortcomings of the communication code. The authors of the recommended books included: Justyna Bargielska, Konrad Góra, Ewa Kuryluk, Mikołaj Łoziński, Krystyna Miłobędzka, Wojciech Nowicki, Jakub Pszoniak, Dominika Słowik, and Paweł Sołtys.
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