Literary Output Research Articles

Dead Serious? On the Presence (and the Absence) of Comic Elements in Cyprian Norwid’s Works

Critical studies of Cyprian Norwid’s writing, just like the scholarship on the literature of Polish Romanticism, focus mostly on the religious, philosophical, ironic and aesthetic aspects of his works. The question of humour in Norwid’s literary output still has not been extensively examined. The paper analyzes Norwid’s comical works. In his early masterpieces, published between 1842 and 1852, comic elements were almost absent, but after his trip to the United States an important change can be noticed in his way of writing, and humour becomes a key elelement of his literary writing and visual art. It can be argued that his diffi cult American experiences (alienation, struggle with the new language, desperate attempts to fi nd work) changed Norwid’s perception of himself as an artist and taught him to look at his art from a distance.

Działania na rzecz upowszechniania ochron podejmowane w Krakowie przez Józefa Teodora Głębockiego w XIX wieku Activities Taken in Cracow by Józef Teodor Głębocki in the 19th Century to Promote the Use of Childcare Facilities

Przedmiotem badań niniejszego artykułu była działalność dobroczynna Józefa Teodora Głębockiego w XIX w. w Krakowie. Szczególną uwagę zwrócono na jego zaangażowanie w upowszechnianie zakładania instytucji dla małych dzieci nazywanych ochronami. Stanowiły one znaczący element w budowaniu systemu opieki nad małym dzieckiem i rozwoju pedagogiki przedszkolnej. Celem artykułu było ukazanie działalności J.T. Głębockiego w stowarzyszeniach dobroczynnych oraz jego dorobku literackiego służącego m.in. propagowaniu potrzeby objęcia opieką dzieci rodziców zajętych wielogodzinną pracą zarobkową w mieście. Zastosowano w nim analizę dokumentów źródłowych, których podstawę stanowiły materiały zgromadzone w Archiwum Narodowym w Krakowie. Ustalono, że Głębocki był członkiem znaczących towarzystw dobroczynnych, w tym Arcybractwa Miłosierdzia i Banku Pobożnego, Krakowskiego Towarzystwa Dobroczynności, Komitetu Ochron dla małych dzieci. Jego działalność na rzecz ubogich dorosłych i dzieci, opracowania poświęcone dobroczynności upowszechniały taką formę opieki.

Diasporic trajectories: Charting new critical perspectives

In the course of the last few decades, the field of diaspora studies has developed considerably in terms of both literary output and scholarship and has come to span a large array of geographical c...

“How does one lay to rest the ghost of Faulkner?”: William Faulkner as Coetzeean “counter voice”

ABSTRACTThis article explores J. M. Coetzee’s evolving literary relationship to William Faulkner by examining Coetzee’s published and unpublished works, including materials found in the Harry Ransom Center and the Amazwi Museum of South African Literature. Throughout his career, Coetzee regarded Faulkner as a writer whose primary concern was to tell and retell the epic of a particular historical moment. The way that Coetzee writes and thinks about Faulkner can be seen as a touchstone of how he thought about the impact that his Afrikaner identity would have on his literary output. Coetzee moves from an “obscure combat” with Faulkner in Dusklands and In the Heart of the Country, to a less fraught relationship of diminishing significance in his later work. In Waiting for the Barbarians, Coetzee continued to “converse” with Faulkner intertextually, but treats him as a “Counter voice” to shape his work, ultimately deviating from Faulkner’s style and ideas.

Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka: An Annotated Discography

ABSTRACT The goal for this annotated discography project is to (re-)introduce readers to the breadth and diversity of their engagement with audio technology as a crucial dimension of Hughes and Baraka’s literary output. Such recordings, we contend, use technology as a politically charged medium that disrupts distinctions between orality and literacy, challenge the privileged status of the visual in Western culture, and transform the material texts of black poetry. Engaging with multimedia forms allows the artists to resist historical constraints on black literacy and broaden their literary audience.

Empire and Modernism in Joseph Conrad’s ‘Karain: A Memory’

Abstract Joseph Conrad’s ‘Karain: A Memory’ (1897) is not often cited as a landmark of literary modernism. Conrad’s Malay story appeared during the year in which The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ announced his arrival as an author with modernist ambitions. It also belongs to the same Blackwood’s period of his early career that produced arguably his most celebrated work, ‘Heart of Darkness’. Whereas these stories consensually exemplify Conrad’s modernism, ‘Karain’ tends to be construed as an early working-through of the contemporary popular influences that shaped his literary output. Yet, in a significant sense, it also dramatizes the colonial encounter that defined some of the conceptual contours of modernism. This essay explores the story’s composition, early transmission and reception, its self-conscious engagement with its popular cultural lineage, and Conrad’s parallel emergence as a writer of ‘challenging’ fiction. Its aim is not merely to recuperate ‘Karain’ as a work of early modernism, nor simply to re-evaluate Conrad’s story as a rehearsal, in terms of its interrogative relationship with imperialism, for some of his more overtly anti-colonialist fiction. Rather, its wider focus is on how Conrad’s story reflects upon the nature of empire and modernism as mutually sustaining enterprises, and, counter to the view of other modernist authors such as T. S. Eliot, how colonial fiction and modernist writing are not antithetical but rather interrelated literary practices.

Charles Bukowski – America’s Poet of the South

One of the most expressive trends in American culture of the 1950s and 1960s, manifested by the treatment of travel as a motive of life in both the mental and creative spheres, can be confidently attributed to the Beat generation. Their consumption lifestyle, crazy undertakings, love and moral fights, in which they entered without any moderation, led them to living problems and, consequently, to being lost. This generation almost automatically brings to mind the portrait of young, vulnerable Americans, rebellious and lost, oppressed and radical, wanting freedom and falling into trouble. The myth of the Beat generation is one of the most distinct myths of American culture of the twentieth century. We know very little about Beat in Poland. Admittedly, there have been several studies concerning the literary output of Beat writers, but they do not fully reflect the complexity of the phenomenon and contexts in which they were shaped. We are constantly looking at them in terms of mythologized rebellion. Associated with beat, Charles Bukowski is the best example of a person whose work was inspired by his own experiences related to sex, alcohol, poverty and human weaknesses.

Joseph Browne: Literature and Politics in Early Eighteenth Century England

The system of propaganda employed by the competing political groups in early eight- eenth century England embraced the popular literary circles in order to gain their support, a process which was reflected in the prolific and politically inclined literary output of the period. One of the lesser known members of these circles was the writer and physi- cian Joseph Browne. Little information concerning Browne is available, something which perhaps can be attributed to the relatively scant attention paid to his person. One critic, Howard Weinbrot, in his study on Samuel Johnson, acknowledged Browne as the author of the poem “The Gothick Hero” (so far only accredited to Browne) and associated his political views with support for the Hanoverian dynasty that ascended the British throne in 1714. However, the works Browne actually authored, as well as those attributed to him, contradict such a statement. In fact, his literary output, journalism, literary and political circles as well as his posthumous opinion reflected in nineteenth century works and com- ments on his literary activity prove Browne’s anti-Harleyite, anti-Whig and therefore anti- Hanoverian views. This article attempts to draw a sketch of Joseph Browne, confirming the constancy of his political views, and contributes to the discussion on the authorship of a number of key texts hitherto only attributed to him.

A War Poet in Absentia: the Year 1918 in Jaroslav Hašek’s Literary Output

This article purports to give an outline of the major evolutions in Hašek’s literary output around the year 1918, a year that saw not only the end of the world war, but also, for the writer himself, the start of the Russian civil war. The Russian Revolution meant for Hašek, as he wrote in 1918, the transition from a “war between States” – or “war between Empires” – to a “war of the proletariat against capitalism”. The lack of safe information about Hašek’s biography during this short, yet crucial, period of his life does not still prevent us from retracing the repercussions of the great events of 1918 on the east front – the fall of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, the founding myth of the Czechoslovakian Legion and the beginnings of the Soviet Union – in the literary works of an author who has been taxed for being a renegade to each of the three aforementioned causes. The particular issue of Švejk’s maturation during the war may help us to put the year 1918 into a perspective with the end (though, only to some extent) of the conflicts and the beginning (however protracted) of the post-war period. Whereas the novel was about the Good Soldier’s bursting into the conflict, this article observes Hašek himself, walking out of the world war.

Greek symposion as a space for philosophical discourse: Xenophanes and criticism of the poetic tradition

The aim of the present article is to discuss the relation between the philosophy and poetry in archaic Greece on the example of Xenophanes of Colophon (6th century BC), the poet best known for a critique of anthropomorphic imagery of the traditional religion. The initial problem lies in understanding the performative aspect of the elegiac poems of Xenophanes; analysis of the fragment 1W and 2W has revealed that the Xenophanes’ literary output can be situated within the framework of the aristocratic symposium. This sympotic context determines the second question, wiz. how the poetic fragments fi t with the Xenophanes’ compositions in which he attacks the traditional beliefs and poetic ideas of Homer or Hesiod. The particular focus has been on the fragments of elegies that are presumed to belong to the collection named Sylloi: as the author has suggested, the critique of traditional mythical narratives, as well as undermining the authority of other poets, can be interpreted as an expression of performative practices functioning at the symposia of the archaic and classical epochs. By removing the division between the „philosophy” and „poetry”, the different aspects of Xenophanes’ fragments start to coincide with the phenomenon of ancient symposium, understood as a space for the intellectual competition.

Tracking the Evolution of Literary Style via Dirichlet–Multinomial Change Point Regression

Summary It is typical in stylometry to assume that authors have a unique writing style which is common to all their published writings and is constant over time. Based on this assumption, statistical techniques can be used to answer literary questions, such as authorship attribution, in a quantitative manner. However, the claim that authors have a constant literary style has not received much investigation or validation. We propose a collection of statistical models based on Dirichlet–multinomial change point regression which can capture the evolution of writing style over time, including both gradual changes in style as the author matures, and abrupt changes which can be caused by extreme events in the author’s life. To illustrate our framework, we study the literary output of the celebrated British author Sir Terry Pratchett, who was tragically diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease during the last years of his life. Contrary to the usual assumptions made in stylometry, we find evidence of both gradual changes in style over his lifetime, and an abrupt change which corresponds to his Alzheimer’s diagnosis. We also investigate the published writings of Agatha Christie, who is also rumoured to have suffered from Alheizmer’s disease towards the end of her life, and find evidence of gradual drift, but no corresponding abrupt change. The implications for stylometry and authorship attribution are discussed.

Tradition, Modernity and Utopia in Muṣṭafà Luṭfī al-Manfalūṭī’s Madīnat al-Saʿādah

Abstract Utopian and dystopian writing does not generally belong to the established canon of Modern Arabic prose, which is largely founded upon realism. However, utopian elements appear with relative frequency in the Nahḍawī literary output, as testified by early texts such as Faransīs Marāš’ Ġābat al-Ḥaqq, Faraḥ Anṭūn’s al-Dīn wa-l-ʿilm wa-l-māl and Muṣṭafà Luṭfī al-Manfalūṭī’s Madīnat al-Saʿādah. Utopian concepts in these and other similar works are deployed to introduce ideas and debates of modernity to their Arab readers, in a context where entrenched views on how social life should be organized were under deep scrutiny. Utopian writing is concerned with debating and challenging social organizations. While it is sometimes regarded as typical of a Western Modern “critical” tradition of thought, in which it came to be codified into a specific literary genre, most of its features appear in pre-modern literatures as well. This is particularly unsurprising in Islamicate contexts, whose literature and philosophy have been in continuous mutual exchange with the “West” and share with it both Classical (Hellenic) and Abrahamic foundations. I argue that, in the Nahḍah context, utopian writing could have provided an instrument to convey selected “modern” ideas and writing styles while consciously melding them with the local Arabic traditions. This paper analyzes Manfalūṭī’s short story Madīnat al-Saʿādah (The City of Happiness), one of the earliest examples of Nahḍawī utopian writing by a Muslim writer. I show that in displaying, as already known, marked references to the Classical Arabic literary tradition, while incorporating, engaging, and selectively suggesting several ideas central to Western discussions on modernity, this short story exemplifies the richness of Nahḍawī reflection.

Thomas Higgons’s “The Dismal Tempest”: an unpublished seventeenth-century play fragment

ABSTRACT This article introduces a new seventeenth-century play fragment, “The Dismal Tempest,” by Sir Thomas Higgons (1623/4-1691), a Member of Parliament. It presents “The Dismal Tempest” as an act of political playwriting and contextualizes it in relation to Higgons’s other literary output, including his now-lost collection of poetry. “The Dismal Tempest,” I suggest, draws on tropes from pastoral and romance genres in order to promote a pro-Stuart agenda. This article provides the first bibliography of Higgons’s works as well as the first edition of his play fragment, which offers important evidence about amateur playwriting and political theatre in seventeenth-century England. With its emphasis on succession and inherent nobility, “The Dismal Tempest” reflects both the theatrical conventions and political climate in which it was written.

DETERMINANTS AND DILEMMAS IMPACTING THE COOPERATION OF FAMILY AND SCHOOL IN CONVEYING COMMUNITY VALUES FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE LITERARY OUTPUT OF TERESA ŚLIWIŃSKA, A TEACHER FROM POZNAŃ. BIOGRAPHICAL RESEARCH

Researching biography does not only mean exploring the course and trajectory of human life but also understanding people’s life projects, see goals that have been achieved or abandoned and the legacy if there remains any. The article presents one of the areas of pedagogical activity of Teresa Śliwińska: a teacher, headmistress, methodological advisor and community activist, which is a concern for building a school community. The subject of our paper in view of T. Śliwiśka’s literary output is the selected examples on passing on community (collective) values to students, such as religious, family and patriotic values by teachers and parents together. We have not only analyzed values themselves, but also the conditions and dilemmas accompanying the process of passing on the values and the cooperation of the school and home environments.

Archiwum pisarza, topografia jego utworów i ich potencjał dydaktyczny. O dwóch opowiadaniach Włodzimierza Odojewskiego z Wielkopolską, Poznaniem i archiwum w tle

Autorka artykułu skupia się na biografii i prozie Włodzimierza Odojewskiego – jednego z najważniejszych współczesnych polskich pisarzy. Od 2008 jego spuścizna literacka jest gromadzona na Wydziale Filologii Polskiej i Klasycznej Uniwersytetu im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu. Celem pracy jest wskazanie, jak zbiór archiwalny może być wykorzystany w dydaktyce na różnych etapach kształcenia. Tekst stanowi również swego rodzaju propozycję dla nauczycieli, jak zaznajomić uczniów i studentów z twórczością Odojewskiego. Część pierwsza pokazuje dokumenty archiwalne (rękopisy, maszynopisy, korespondencję powstałe w różnych etapach życia pisarza) jako źródło wiedzy o biografii autora i dziejach jego twórczości, jak również przybliża pracę archiwisty. Druga część przedstawia znaczące dla Odojewskiego miejsca w Wielkopolsce, opisane w jego opowiadaniach, które stanowią indywidualne zapisy pamięci zachowane w tekstach literackich.

Adela Pineda Franco's Steinbeck and Mexico: A Cinematographic Gaze in the Era of United States Hegemony

Adela Pineda Franco's Steinbeck and Mexico: A Cinematographic Gaze in the Era of United States Hegemony

Ukrainian Aspects of Michalonus Lituanus’s Literary Output

Ukrainian Aspects of Michalonus Lituanus’s Literary Output

‘Shew Us Thy Salvation’: Charles Wesley and the Liturgical Year

ABSTRACT Charles Wesley's objection to his brother John's reduction of ‘holy days’ in the latter's abridgement of the Book of Common Prayer entitled The Sunday Service of the Methodists (1784) suggests that Charles valued the Church of England's temporal and sanctoral cycles. To understand this appreciation for the Church's liturgical calendar, Charles's literary output from 1736 to 1756 is examined, a period that corresponds to the time frame of Charles's manuscript journal. The journal itself serves as a source of investigation as do the hymns related to the Christian year that Charles published between 1739 and 1746. Analysis is made of representative hymns to determine Charles's use of, by allusion and/or direct reference, the scripture readings and collects specified by the Prayer Book for Christmas, Epiphany, Easter, Ascension, and Whitsunday. The study reveals Charles's admiration for festival days as occasions to demonstrate God's ongoing desire for human salvation.

Patriotyzm według Pawła Hulki-Laskowskiego

A descendant of the Czech Brethren, Pawel Hulka-Laskowski belonged to a group of thousands of Polish Evangelists with foreign roots who consciously chose Poland as their homeland during the period of partitions. Many became Polish patriots. For this reason, Poland’s welfare was one of the main themes in Hulka-Laskowski’s scientific and literary output. He propagated the concept of open patriotism. In his opinion, an affiliation to the Polish nation was primarily of a cultural, not ethnic nature. The stereotype of a Pole-Catholic was dangerous to the Polish nation, because it repelled people of foreign origin who were not Roman Catholics. In his educational activity among workers, Hulka-Laskowski emphasised the importance of civic education, stressing the significance of education for love as a way of making the Polish nation more attractive to foreigners.

O ŻYCIU I DZIEŁACH AUSTRIACKIEGO ETOLOGA PROF. IRENÄUSA EIBLA-EIBESFELDTA (15 CZERWCA 1928 – 2 CZERWCA 2018)

Zmarły w dniu 2 czerwca 2018 r. prof. Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt należy do najwybitniejszych współczesnych biologów zajmujących się problematyką zachowań zwierząt i ludzi. Był twórcą etologii człowieka. Rozwinął program długookresowych badań ludów pierwotnych: Yanomami, Eipo, Buszmenów, Himba, Trobriandczyków Balijczyków. Jego dorobek obejmuje 19 książek i około 500 artykułów naukowych, w których stwierdził m.in., że ludzie posiadają przystosowanie filogenetyczne w zakresie postrzegania, przetwarzania informacji, sposobu myślenia i ludzkiego zachowania. Eibl-Eibesfeldt był też autorem publikacji o charakterze filozoficzno-społecznym, w których podejmował podstawowe problemy dotyczące społeczeństwa, gospodarki i ochrony środowiska.