Dział: Im dalej w las, tym mniej drzew

Abstract: Peter Wohlleben's Hidden Life of Trees has inspired many readers to intensively anthropomorphise the way they think about forest. At least, judging by the discussions in social media and journalism, we deal with an entire wave of conversations about “mother caring for their children” and “multi-generational families”. It seems these metaphors are well-known, well-rooted and bringing us closer to the plant “Others”. Is that actually so? Are there different possibilities to conceptualise the forest-human community and does that community cover these two species only? Where to look for such different figures of thought? The paper is an encouragement to persevere in the controversiality of the relationship between people and organisms which make what we call forest and not to yield to the temptation to overfamiliarise them.

Dział: Im dalej w las, tym mniej drzew

Dział: Im dalej w las, tym mniej drzew

Abstract: New (for the West) visions of plants are based on scientific discoveries and on philosophical reflection which shows how the to-date research of plants were burdened with models of culture that required confirmation from life sciences). The selectively treated examples from the plant world (trees, forest environments) consolidated the general belief which places the plant world on the border of the so-called inanimate nature, also an archaic cultural construct present almost exclusively in the Western ideology. The difficulties in understanding all mechanisms of the life of trees stem, inter alia, from their longevity, size, poorly studied physiology and reproduction. The basic barrier to knowing plants is the destruction of their natural habitats and adult forms which (tress in particular) are reduced to a small age range at which they are cut down for economic purposes.

Dział: Im dalej w las, tym mniej drzew

Abstract: The paper discusses the problem of “memorial groves” - the planting and organisation of activities by Polish foresters. In these actions the memory function of trees is also used. For the Polish forestry, the purpose of trees is not only to grow - they are not exclusively a natural treasure. They are supposed to teach to remember and they co-create a specific version of the past, which is being constantly referred to. By being included in the forest mythopractice, trees are turned into a national treasure. The “memorial groves” help connect the past, present and future. Such a connection makes the forest a substitute for history. Nature management becomes simultaneously memory management.

Dział: Im dalej w las, tym mniej drzew

Dział: Im dalej w las, tym mniej drzew

Abstract: In the Polish history of literature and literary criticism, assigning nationality to trees occurs despite the letter of the text and applies to the identification of the Polish identity both in individual species which grow to be symbols (for instance Kochanowski's lime tree, sycamore tree in Laura and Philon [Laura i Filon], pine tree in Homeless People [Ludzie Bezdomni]), as well as in groups of trees (wilderness in Sir Thaddeus [Pan Tadeusz]), forest in references to the January uprising in Orzeszkowa's short stories, Forest Echoes [Echa Leśne] or in Grottger's paintings). In the patriotic historical narrative, forest is an ally to soldiers, refuge for guerillas, protagonist in first and second world war songs. Alas, despite the Polish identity of forest represented by specific trees, its belonging to the national culture does not have to go hand in hand with protective measures (even in the case of a nationalistic policy of the government).

Dział: Im dalej w las, tym mniej drzew

Abstract: The paper considers the history of relationships between people and trees spanning the history of Ireland, focusing in particular on the heyday of the Celtic culture and the cult of sacred trees, the Celtic Revival which subjected nature to idealisation and aesthetisation, and the prosperity of the Celtic Tiger which became a symptom of the bankruptcy of ecological responsibility on the green island. The ecocritical perspective presented in the text helps consider, using ancient symbols (such as the Tree of Life) and poetry, the relationship of man with nature, which is a vital task in Ireland, painfully affected by the economic crisis and in the global scale during the anthropocene.

Dział: Im dalej w las, tym mniej drzew

Abstract: Macondo, a place created by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (but also another name of Cavanillesia platanifolia tree), is a symbolic reference to the whole of Latin America. The literary presentation of the tree in Hundred Years of Solitude is a starting point for analysing the situation of the forests in Latin America today and the tree-friendly measures that are being undertaken in the region.

Dział: Im dalej w las, tym mniej drzew

Abstract: Among trees (and between words), in the bushes, hidden from the heteronormative part of the society, it is where hiding spaces function. The paper describes park from the perspective of subversion of place made by the gay communities in the 1980s and 1990s. Therefore, a park becomes a heterotopia, an alternative place for queers and faggots excluded by the general society. The style that emerged during pickets (kamp), along with whole system of poses, symbols, codes and language of hiding (sociolect) translates into the experience of park users as a multi-dimensional space which combines the conscious with the hidden, heterosexual with non-heterosexual, real and imagined.

Dział: Wat - moc awangardy

Dział: Wat - moc awangardy

Dział: Wat - moc awangardy

Abstract: The paper is an attempt at comparative analysis of Miron Białoszewski poems read to a tape recorder (mainly later poems, e.g. from the Detach Oneself [Odczepić się] cycle) and Aleksander Wat's Whispers to a Tape Recorder [Naszepty Magnetofonowe]). The two major poets of the Polish 20th century avant-garde, though of different generations, whisper their most personal poems to a tape recorder and the creative process somehow is forced by their situation: sickness, suffering, feeling of exclusion, nearness of death... Their poems, however, “meet” on the level of poetics, style, intense use of metaphors. They also uncover a metaphysical space. The essay has a wishful conclusion that, apart from Ryszard Nycz's project to write a history of modernist literature from the angle of poetics of experience, a history of modernist poetry as a history of voice, the voice of poets, is possible.

Dział: Wat – moc awangardy

Abstract: The paper is an attempt to interpret the manuscript versions of the Last Poem. I focus on what comprises the avant-text of the poem which engages in various relationships and affiliations with the final version, thus co-creating the consecutive stages of creation. I adopt the genetic criticism approach, which fosters the avant-text and the postulate to include the process-based creation of literary work into the critical reflection (écruture). In line with this field's premises, I attempt to reconstruct the poem writing process, to uncover the rejected varieties and senses, pinpoint the areas where alternative meanings coexist, and to recover the text lost in print, non-final, dynamic and ready to take on many possible forms.

Dział: Wat - moc awangardy

Abstract: The provocative title is not supposed to question the significance of poetry in the works of Aleksander Wat, but to suggest the singularity of his writing. Now a valued author of poetry, Wat only late recognised his poetry as his most important achievement. The paper attempts to demonstrate that the declaration of being a poet, which he made in his last years, has an other side to it, namely the feeling of a non-fulfilment as a writer, which in the biography of the author of Mediterranean Poems did not come to light with incurable pain disease but sooner, due to a failed attempt to return to the original literary activity that Wat took up after returning to Poland in 1946.

Dział: Wat - moc awangardy

Abstract: The paper is the analysis of Aleksander Wat's poem Antaeus' Departure. The context of the analysis is the combined vision of a “drifting world” derived from the Japanese chronicle of Kojiki and a vision of a writer as a man “drifting in the self”, presented in Herman Melville's Pierre. In this context the author tracks the intertextual game Wat started in this work and reconstructs the spatial, cultural and linguistic disorientation of the subject in the “watertown” as captured in the poem, as well as the attempts to plot a stable course of existence.

Dział: Wat - moc awangardy

Abstract: Wat is interested in evil inevitably entwined in the history of humanity and started by Cain's act. He initiates the principle of the modern allowance of evil, the acting in the name of the emancipation of the “handicapped” and progress. For the poet, the critical endpoints in history include nazism, Holocaust and communism. In his perspective, they prove to be sequences of history that started with events recorded in the Old Testament. He employed irony to depict history, and in Wat's poetry it is through irony that the subject is involved in the “dialectics of history”. This radically critical irony uncovers paradoxes embedded in the biblical beginnings of humanity. As a result, the irony uncovered in history triggers ironic suspicion of adopted theological interpretations.

Dział: Wat - moc awangardy

Dział: Wat – moc awangardy

Abstract: The sketch is an attempt to analyse a late poem by Aleksander Wat [***] I sat in the rushes which was emblematic of the final period of his works. Major interpretative tropes include: the dedication to Pierre Emmanuel, reference to the thesis of Wat's paper Poésie contre l’histoire dated 1959 and, through poem's imagery, to Julian Tuwim's Rushes (1924) and Above the vast, clear depths... by Adam Mickiewicz. For Mickiewicz, the epiphany-like experience of vision at water's edge helps discover the fundamental principle of existence. The lyrical subject in Wat's poem does not ponder on the essence and purpose of existence, or, all the more, on poetry. The subject is not caught in the rush of life but in the state of limbo, between life and death.

Dział: Wat - moc awangardy

Abstract: The author tracks the affinity between the post-war writings of Aleksander Wat and Jacques Derrida's reflection. Both in the works of Wat, and in deconstruction, he finds a peculiar existential drama which consists in experiencing the chance of comprehension and the constant disintegration of sense, which both authors are honestly trying to face up to. Hence, Wat's writings and Derrida's thought are characterised by unique autobiographical qualities and by a (negative) dialectics of whole and part which aims to demonstrate openness, non-completedness, fragmentary nature or each of the existential projects. From this perspective three Wat's poems are interpreted: *** [If the word “exists”…] [Jeżeli wyraz „istnieje”…], Reminder [Przypomnienie] and Necelh ijdara, wherein the author of the paper sees a clear deconstructive “sensitivity”.

Dział: Wat - moc awangardy

Abstract: The paper presents the interpretation of Aleksander Wat's Odes, a poem comprising three parts and included in the Dark Trinket [Ciemne świecidło] (1968) collection, which is treated here as a kind of synthesis of Wat's writings. The analysis focuses on the genological and intertextual relationships and its conclusions allow the formulation of two hypotheses referring to the writings of the author of Diary without Vowels: one regarding the fundamental significance that Franz Kafka's works had on it and a major role animal motifs play in it. In the paper, both these hypotheses are treated as a pretext to return to the considerations of the religious identity of Wat later in his life.

Dział: Wat - moc awangardy

Dział: Poznańska Nagroda Lilteracka

Dział: Poznańska Nagroda Lilteracka

Dział: Aktor/ka do grania

Dział: Esej

Abstract: The paper's aim is to analyse the representation of works of Jenny Holzer's Redaction Paintings series in the context of building a collective memory. Taking into account the relationship between art and memory, I research how this relationship operates in the above example. The subject of the series are the declassified documents of the American government regarding military operations in the Middle East which the artist made into paintings by transferring them onto the canvass and adding colour. This transfer of the war narrative from the field of politics into art makes it possible to go beyond the fixed framework of memory and shape it anew. The artist's polemics with ready-made patterns of remembering imposed by the government and the media facilitates the reflection not so much on the discourse as on the framework within which is it legitimised.

Dział: Na warsztacie

Abstract: The paper discusses Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny. Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. It has become a best-seller, translated into many languages, it had to be reprinted in Poland and the USA. Why is such a small book so sough-after? The author analyses Snyder's motivations for writing the book; then goes on to show that being an academic does not mean ridding oneself of the professional academic/humanist's workshop when one decides to speak publicly in an urgent case. Snyder's book, using the lessons of the 20th century history and the advice provided by the 20th century thinkers, intellectuals, researchers from the Central and Eastern Europe, is a collection of instructions for everyone on how to be a responsible citizen, regardless of their political views.

Dział: Felieton

Dział: Felieton

Dział: Felieton