This article is an analysis of Wisława Szymborska’s style of reading used by the poet in her quasi-reviews collected in Lektury nadobowiązkowe Non-compulsory readings. The ludic poetics of the book ...is closely related to the author’s inclination towards curiosity and nonsense humour which expresses her typical “sense of oddness”. The aim of the reading is thus to reveal in radically diverse texts (a floristic compendium or a popular guidebook How to live more comfortably side by side with Montaigne’s Essays or Nietzsche’s Aphorisms) some uncommon details, humorous paradoxes and unexpected facts and incidents. Szymborska’s way of reading, animated by the spirit of a sophisticated play, has also its source in the historic concept of cabinets of curiosities, reflected here in the Bibliotheca Curiosa as well as in Julian Tuwim’s device cicer cum caule structuring his famous collection of “useless knowledge”.
The article presents a reception of a social realist volume of Mieczysław Jastrun’s poetry, entitled Poemat o mowie polskiej A poem on the Polish speech, from a point of view of Czesław Miłosz, who ...was a migrant at that time. His review study dated 1953 not only comments on this book but also uses it as a ground for presenting the fundamental features of “positive” lyric poetry created from 1949 to 1953. The author of the article points out three basic principles which organise the statement of Miłosz. These are: the principle of ostensible identification, the principle of desired objectivism and the principle of assessment ambivalence. The reflection on the text of Miłosz is, for the sake of the lecture order, preceded by an overall description of the Poemat… and by a comment to its critical reception in the 1950s.
The article is an attempt to interpret the poem Masmix (written by Tomasz Pułka) in terms of the relationship that the piece makes with other author’s poems (especially those published on the ...Internet) and the works of Stanisław Barańczak or Philip Larkin. Due to the contextual reading it is revealed that the most important subject of the discussed text is the problem of space, which is later examined in reference to the Plato’s and Derrida’s category of Chora.
The article examines the influence of the avant-garde prose of American writer Djuna Barnes on the work of contemporary Polish artist Ewa Kuryluk, directing particular attention to the intertextual ...play between the novels Nightwood (Barnes) and Century 21 (Kuryluk). Barnes’ writing, which is, to put it after Julie Taylor, a representation of “affective modernism,” a style of emotion behind the experienced and experiencing body, becomes for Kuryluk one of the main sources of portraying trauma and love. The contemporary Polish writer treads in the footsteps of Barnes: both at the level of language and imagery, as well as subject matter and symbolism relating to issues of femininity, motherhood and sexuality. The artist captures Barnes’ visual and photographic imagination, which is in correlation with other artists of the first half of the 20th century (e.g. Hans Bellmer), to build an image of love at the end of the 20th century.
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