Polish Prose Research Articles

TRAVEL NARRATIVES IN CONTEMPORARY POLISH LITERATURE. ETHICAL, CULTURAL AND SOCIAL ASPECTS

Purpose. The presentation of results and analyses regarding on the journeys of ethical, cultural and social provenance in narratives available in contemporary Polish literature illustrated by chosen examples. Method. To prepare the presentation, qualitative methods were used together with the analysis technique of the content/plot of novels of autobiographies of contemporary Polish prose writers and travelers. The author analysed representative texts of such highly-regarded figures as philosophers by profession – Marek Kamiński, Joanna Bator, Krzysztof Środa – and wellknown writers: Andrzej Stasiuk, Krzysztof Varga, Ziemowit Szczerek and others. Findings. Research showed the authors’ great interest in history, culture, ethical and social issues during their numerous peregrinations all over Poland, Southern Europe and Central and Eastern Europe. The narration of the chosen author-travelers contains numerous reflections of existential-philosophical and cultural-social nature, focusing on sociological analysis. The interpretative framework in the works of the discussed authors fluctuates around local, global and glocal problems. Research and conclusions limitations. The study concerned only the works of Polish authors and concentrated on their journeys all over Poland, Southern and Central and Eastern Europe; borderlands, peripheral and cross-border areas. The phenomenon of the journeys of the analysed authors lies in the fact that their experiences are subjective, and their expeditions are undertaken to a considerable degree in mental space, a depicted world; they are unique imaginary adventures. Practical implications. Reading the works discussed in the article expands knowledge on culture, history and the society of countries where the authors undertake their ethically responsible travels. Their books can successfully become an element of literary/cultural tourism. Originality. In literature on the subject works concerning individual authors discussed in the article are dispersed. The advantage of the presented text is the depiction and analysis of the creative output of the examined authors in one place, including the characteristics of their journeys: spiritual, culinary, pilgrimage, cognitive and escape. Type of paper. The article is a review and a scientific, reflective essay.

Bez wyjścia? O zagubieniu aksjologicznym bohaterów dziecięcych i młodzieżowych (na wybranych przykładach twórczości Ewy Przybylskiej, Barbary Kosmowskiej)

Without the Choice? On the Loss of Axiological Heroes of Children and Youth Literature (on Selected Examples of the Work of Ewa Przybylska and Barbara Kosmowska)Article concerns problems of „new character” which appears in literature of the end of XX and the beginning of XXI centuries and is rooted in the phenomenon of young „generation of nobody” and show rich psychological portraits of protagonists. Contemporary Polish prose, which is not optimistic anymore, show anthropological sensitivity, is called a literature of initiation, present a young protagonists in a labyrinth of values, whose life seems to be suffering, they are lost in reality, lonely, looking for answers of difficult existential questions, looking for the true, friendship and love. Most significant literary examples which present problems mentioned above and which are rooted in the wide context of ethics – are works of Ewa Przybylska: Dzień kolibra (1997) i Dotyk motyla (2016) and Most na Missisipi (2012) and Barbara Kosmowska: Pozłacana rybka (2007),Sezon na zielone kasztany (2013) and Samotni.pl(2012). Most of these texts could be discussed also in educational perspective.

The Identification of Stereotypes in the Artistic Text

Stereotypes are an extremely complex object of research. Mental construction cannot be static. Old stereotypes slowly change, new ones appear and with the help of various codes (linguistic, cultural, literary) the author encrypts all of this into the artistic text. Besides the existence of linguistically expressed but not linguistically fixed stereotypes in artistic texts, stable stereotypes undergo different modifications of sense and verbalization forms. The ultimate goal of the research is to identify the factors which determine the form and the meaning of stereotypes verbalizers; to carry out a functional differentiation of linguistic signs that refer to these conventional referents in Ukrainian, Polish and British realist prose. Stabilized stereotypes are fixed by nominations of different structural and semantic complexity. Within the limits of the semantic structure of a nomination there is a hierarchy of semantic features: their typicality, frequency of functioning and, hence - stereotypicality - decreases from the center towards the periphery. In the core zone, semantics of a stereotype coincides with the semantics of a prototype. Stereotypes with different degree of conventionality and communicative relevance are explicated in artistic texts with the help of structurally different nominative and communicative units.

Fikcyjna nauka, naukowa fikcja i widmowa biblioteka. "Wstęp do imagineskopii" Śledzia Otrembusa Pogrobelskiego

Author analyses a novel Wstep do imagineskopii. Proba zarysu [ Introduction to imagineskopy. Attempt of an outline ] by Śledź Otrembus Podgrobelski [Stanislaw Moskal] In the context of Polish prose of the 1970’s and 1980’s. He studies how scientific discourse is simulated, describes relations between fiction (and fictionality) and a fake science and it’s methodology as a result of a diagnosis of science in the late modern age. Moskal builds an ironic quasi-scientific text in order to make a relevant commentary about his era, but also to avoid exaggerated sobriety of academic discourse. He hides amongst his artificially created phantoms, non-existing authors. In this way he can phrase his concerns about the privileged role of experts and knowledge they provide in the late modernity. He also points out that literature is one of the most (or even the most) adequate metadiscourse because of it’s self-awareness and tendency to ambiguity

The memory of Polish and Jewish past: The problem of space and vector (young Polish prose of the 2000–2010s)

The article sheds lide on the spatial aspect of the problem of Polish and Jewish past of Poland in the prose of the third generation after the Holocaust. It studies texts written by young authors who are connected by their origin both to Jewish (P. Paźiński) and Polish (S. Chutnik, I. Ostachowicz) parts of this past.

Nazwy własne od (literackiej) kuchni. Onomastyczne aspekty pisarstwa Marka Słyka na przykładzie powieści „W barszczu przygód”

Proper Names from the (Literary) Backstage. Onomastic Aspects of the Prose of Marek Slyk on the Basis of his Novel “In the Borsch of Adventures”The study aims to contribute to research on the onomastic-stylistic diversity of Polish prose in the late 20th century. In focus are those onomastic properties of literature that reveal connections between names and language in the process of creating non-mimetic, literary-style fiction. These properties also point to the nature of proper names as they function in a literary work of art — that work being a post-modern intellectual-literary game. The names used in the novel (anthroponyms, toponyms, chrematonyms, also zoonyms) mainly derive from the author’s linguistic creativity: they contribute to the world-view projected through the text. That world-view is “purposefully and to tally unusual”, different from the real world.

Funkcje składniowe leksemu radość i jego rosyjskie ekwiwalenty przekładowe

Artykuł prezentuje rosyjskie ekwiwalenty nazywającego emocję rzeczownika radość. Jako źródło materiału faktograficznego posłużyły teksty współczesnej prozy polskiej i jej rosyjskiego przekładu. W większości przypadków wystąpił słownikowy odpowiednik радость.

Leksem błękitny w polskiej prozie (badania korpusowe)

Celem artykulu jest omowienie wystepowania przymiotnika blekitny w tekstach zgromadzonych w Narodowym Korpusie Jezyka Polskiego (NKJP), dostepnym pod adresem www.nkjp. pl. Pod uwage brana jest kategoria „proza” w podkorpusie zrownowazonym, a dane zostaly wyekscerpowane przy pomocy wyszukiwarki PELCRA. Jak pokazuje analiza materialu wyekscerpowanego z podkorpusu zrownowazonego NKJP, blekitny uzywany jest w prozie cześciej niz w tekstach innych, nieliterackich kategorii. Dane korpusowe przemawiają za tym, by uwazac to slowo za wyszukane, „ksiązkowe”. Dane korpusowe dostarczyly materialu pozwalającego na wychwycenie roznic – nie tylko frekwencyjnych – w stosowaniu przez prozaikow przymiotnikow blekitny i niebieski. Ten pierwszy cześciej uzywany jest w opisach nieba, wody, dymow i mgiel, natomiast drugi sluzy do deskrypcji ubran i oczu.

American History Unbound: Asians and Pacific Islanders by Gary Y. Okihiro

429 Reviews enthusiastically participated in the construction of the first transcontinental railroad, hoping that a demonstration of their patriotism would result in national acceptance. The Latter-Day Saints Church envisioned a huge amount of economic benefits for Mormon communities in the new American empire. Mormons cleverly engaged in the debate over progress for their own causes. Unlike Irish and Mormons, whose collective efforts helped to ease some of their pains, Chinese workers, because of their skin color, were never able to find any kind of national belonging as citizens. The Chinese did convince Americans, however, that they were an indispensable force for progress. The priority of their struggle was an economic improvement. Despite navigating such huge geographical and cultural boundaries, The Filth of Progress is able to present a coherent history, which hardly veers off the main tracks of its arguments. American progress was built on the backs of those “non-Americans,” who were denied most basic rights and privileges by the nation that believed in an idea of equality. In addition to an original thesis and superb research, the polished prose greatly enhances the quality of this work, allowing it to become an instant classic. Liping Zhu Eastern Washington University AMERICAN HISTORY UNBOUND: ASIANS AND PACIFIC ISLANDERS by Gary Y. Okihiro University of California Press, Oakland, 2015. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. 512 pages. $39.95 paper. Most American readers know about European immigrants and Ellis Island, but aside from some on the West Coast, few have ever heard of Angel Island, where officials oversaw much of the immigration from Asia into the United States. This hefty textbook aims to correct that lack of knowledge. It traces the history of immigration to the United States by persons from Pacific Island communities of Guam, Samoa, Hawai’i, and the Philippines, as well as from China, Japan, and India. From the stories of these newcomers , many American readers will encounter such groups as Chamorros and Tagalog speakers for the first time. While introducing them, Gary Okihiro sets his analysis within a broad chronological framework that extends back in time to include early Polynesian migrations across the south Pacific and stretches to the near present. He ties the experiences of islanders and Asians to those of American Indians and African Americans, seeing all of those groups as victims of the white American majority. His analysis of how American society treated Asian immigrants might have been strengthened had he nodded in the direction of the so-called New Immigration flooding into the country between the 1870s and World War I. During that era, millions of Italians, Slavs, Jews, and others from southern and eastern Europe arrived in the United States. When added to the large existing Irish communities already here, the New Immigrants came to be considered as something less than “white” in the minds of many, and they often experienced the same kinds of exploitation and segregation as Asians. The author contends that much of the anti-Asian prejudice resulted from skin color, but, although often darker complexioned than western Europeans , the New Immigrants did not have black, brown, or yellow skin. Rather they spoke the wrong languages, worshiped God incorrectly, and arrived from the wrong countries during a time of vast social and economic changes. Okihiro anchors his analysis on the world systems theory that divides the world into two zones — cores and peripheries. Economically developed areas called cores are wellestablished nation states, and peripheries are regions of the world that produced the raw materials and excess labor needed by the cores. Until the late nineteenth century, the United Sates and western European nations dominated the international economy through slavery, indentured servitude, and immigration-directed population movements. The book’s narrative focuses on how the core nations attracted immigrants, the migrants’ motivations for traveling to new lands, their experiences as low-paid and over-worked laborers, and the regulations that encouraged, restricted, or controlled immigration. It includes 431 Reviews a rich variety of experiences, nearly all of them showing clearly how capitalists profited from inhuman treatment of the laborers. American History Unbound is a textbook for college and university courses in American immigration and ethnic history. Its prose is clear and readable...

Świat wartości w twórczości Klementyny z Tańskich Hoffmanowej adresowanej do dzieci i młodzieży (na wybranych przykładach)

Clementine Hoffmanowa (1798-1845), maiden name Tanska, a Polish prose writer, one of the first Polish writers for children, the creator of the first Polish children's magazine „Entertainment for Children”. The article aims at the description the values in the work of Clementine Tanska-Hoffman addressed to children and adolescents. Article gives a view of values: piety, patriotism, love of parents and siblings, praises the use of their mother tongue etc. Based on various sources: literary texts of Reminders of the good mother – latest her advice for her daughter (1819), Moral novels for children (1820), Binging of Helen (1823). Cited texts characterized by didacticism and moralizing, which was related to the education model in the early nineteenth century. Tanska, when was writing about values in Moral novels for children , she recalled silhouette of Father Gregory Piramowicz (1735-1801) and prince Joseph Poniatowski (1763-1813). The article describes, that publications of Hoffman after the November Uprising, were controlled by the Russian censor. Shows the universality of Tanska books and their reception by posterity.

Русские переводные соответствия польских обращений, выраженных терминами родства

The article shows the Russian equivalents of the Polish forms of address expressed by the relationship words extracted from the contemporary Polish prose and its translation into Russian. Taking into account the gathered material it can be concluded that the relationship words usually have the form of the vocative case, which is replaced by the nominative case in Russian. The majority of the compiled examples constitute the diminutive forms, conveying speaker’s positive attitude towards the recipient of their utterance.

Rosyjskie ekwiwalenty przekładowe performatywu dziękuję – The Russian equivalents of the Polish lexeme ‘dziękuję’

Artykuł pokazuje rosyjskie ekwiwalenty performatywu dziękuję. Przykłady zostały wyekscerpowane z tekstów współczesnej polskiej prozy i jej przekładów na język rosyjski. W większości przypadków wystąpił słownikowy odpowiednik спасибо.

Edith Wharton at Home: Life at The Mount

Edith Wharton at Home: Life at The Mount

Edith Wharton at Home: Life at The Mount

Edith Wharton at Home: Life at The Mount

Leopold Buczkowski’s Czarny potok: Commemoration of a Shtetl as a Humanistic Crisis

Abstract Leopold Buczkowski (1905–89) is considered one of the most enigmatic Polish prose writers. Czarny potok (Black Torrent), his first postwar novel and his masterpiece, was critically examined in terms of its complex aesthetic. This article focuses on the thematic of Black Torrent, which centers on the destruction of the Jewish town Szabasowa. Thus, in one sense, the novel serves as a Yizkor Book, a testimonial of the destruction of a Jewish community. In another sense, the novel presents a unique vision of Polish and Jewish underground insurgents on a mission to protect the surviving Jewish children and defend the population at large. This Polish-Jewish band proclaims an empathic-dialogic relationship of equals; their shared goal of fighting the occupier and collaborators supersedes the identifications of ethnicity, blood kinship, or religion. However, unavoidable exposure to the inhumane Weltanschauung of the enemy raises the issue of the effects of the genocidal system on the humanistic orientation of the band members. While attempts to reform the perpetrator in an empathic-dialogic interaction fail, the recourse to a violent, ruthless struggle for survival denotes a compromise of the humanistic values of equality, justice, and empathy. The article shows how Buczkowski’s ars poetica informed by his humanistic-enlightened upbringing enabled his vision of human solidarity and mutual obligation under the circumstances of genocidal terror.

This Bridge Will Not Be Gray by Dave Eggers (review)

Reviewed by: This Bridge Will Not Be Gray by Dave Eggers Elizabeth Bush Eggers, Dave This Bridge Will Not Be Gray; illus. Tucker Nichols McSweeney’s, 2015 [104p] ISBN 978-1-940450-47-6 $19.95 Reviewed from galleys R* Gr. 2-6 Emanating from this year’s Blue Ribbons discussion (for results, see this issue) is the observation that there are a growing number of unruly authors and illustrators defying our comfortable notions of how information can be packaged for kids. While this presents a challenge to committee members accustomed to slipping contenders into longstanding categories, it is a boon to real live child readers who appreciate “true stories” but eschew anything that smacks of pedagogy. A thoroughly delightful case study in this shake-up is Eggers and Nichols’ take on the Golden Gate Bridge, an instructive exposition in which no lengths of cable are measured, load bearing is not discussed, and only a single date—1928—makes an appearance. Eggers opens with two extensions of land facing each other across a bay, and the logical impetus to span the water with a bridge. From this simple idea rose the first of several controversies. Why build a bridge that would mar the area’s natural beauty, especially when boats seemed to work just fine? But in 1928 bridge builder Joseph Strauss was hired to design a bridge anyway. Which led to another controversy: his design was ugly. Enter Leon Moisseiff, another bridge designer with a somewhat more palatable aesthetic sense. With the arrival of yet another designer, Irving Morrow, they finally had it just about right: “This bridge, built to span this beautiful land against this beautiful sea, had to be beautiful itself.” Now for the color: “Isn’t that a strange thing, that a very large group of adults would undertake a project of this size, and not have a color picked out?” Here we reach the central point. Color is one weighty idea, and each opinion on the correct color for the bridge reflected the agenda of the nominator. Gray was the safe, traditional route: “Gray was a serious color. Gray was a practical color. Gray was dignified. Who could object to gray?” The Navy and Army, concerned with the safety of their ships and planes passing nearby, argued for black and yellow or red and white stripes: “This is true. This is a factual book. The Army wanted it to look like a candy cane for the same reason the Navy wanted it to look like a tiger with jaundice.” Morrow, though, watched the steel beams rise above the bay clad in the orange rustproof paint in which all steel made a salty sea journey, and he liked what he saw. And people agreed about the “orange steel against the green hills, above the blue water, below the blue-and-white sky. . . . For some reason, that looks right.” Stripped down to its essentials, this story is accessible to readers just gaining their footing on the written word. Touched up with spare poesy and flashes of irreverence, it is inviting to older readers weary of instructional tone. Carefully structured to emulate the unstudied cadence of a speaker carried away with his [End Page 239] own enthusiasm (“First there were the cables. No. Wait. First there were the towers. Of course the towers were first”), it challenges readers to note the stumble and compare it with the primly edited, slickly polished prose they usually encounter in nonfiction books. And while Eggers shapes his informational text into its sleek, playful form, Nichols does the same with his paper collage, set against vivid-toned backgrounds in full-bleed, full-spread visuals. At first glance, this is this kind of construction that raises the reaction, “Oh, heck. I could do that.” The shapes are little more than suggestions of mass and space, and even the paper appears to be of humble photo copy and construction stock. But upon closer examination of the elegant balance of elements in the compositions, and the neat distribution of positive and negative space, it’s clear most of us could never do this after all. Like Irving Morrow, Nichols has the eye. We reach...

Czy onomastyka jest kobietą? Na marginesie lektur antropologicznych i onomastycznych

The article directly and indirectly refers to anthropological and philosophical texts which strive to discover and present the gender factor as important in the light of the humanities. The author refers to “Literackie nie-nazywanie. Onomastykon polskiej prozy wspolczesnej” (Literary Not-naming. Onomasticon of the modern Polish prose) by Magdalena Graf and indicates the femininity factor as a relevant one also in onomastics.

The Uncommercial Traveller ed. by Daniel Tyler

Reviewed by: The Uncommercial Traveller ed. by Daniel Tyler Tony Williams Daniel Tyler, ed. The Uncommercial Traveller. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015. Pp.xlvi + 391. $24. 95; £14.99. The cover of this edition shows the older man, Dickens, from the illustration by G. J. Pinwell used for the 1868 Charles Dickens Edition of The Uncommercial Traveller essay “Travelling Abroad.” The figure has his head bowed and is superimposed on an extract from a map of [End Page 246] nineteenth-century London; it directs the figure’s sightline to the southern end of Borough High Street, the Church of St. George the Martyr and the site of the Marshalsea Prison. It is an evocative piece of design work, uniting the older man of the years when these essays were written with the powerful childhood experiences of the writer in the 1820s. “Do Not Forget,” as we are enjoined in Little Dorrit. The Uncommercial Traveller first made his appearance in the fortieth weekly number of All The Year Round published on 28 January 1860 and was to appear in the pages of the journal during the last ten years of Dickens’s life. In his wide-ranging and detailed introduction to this edition, Daniel Tyler traces his history of the original appearance of these essays and places them in the context of the literary tradition of the occasional essay from which they, in part, emerge. The introduction also locates the essays in terms of Dickens’s writing concerns and his life, particularly their melancholy tone in places and their equally important emphasis on the survival of important human values as communicated through writing. The Uncommercial Traveller works for the “great house of Human Interest Brothers” and has “a large connexion in the fancy goods way” (5). There is, further, a significant exploration of the way the essays relate to a period of change and development in the city from which most of them originate – London – and the impact these changes had on people living through them. The editor is careful to point to the way these changes sometimes occurred during publication. Dickens’s narrative method is further explored in the introduction. Dickens chooses to present these essays in the first-person narrative mode and this is what binds them together, but the narrator is a character creation as well. In one of the later essays, “A Fly-Leaf in a Life” (22 May 1869), he writes that he is “accustomed to observe myself as curiously as if I were another man.” A number of the essays have what seems to be a highly personal, even autobiographical, slant to them, and interpretations have been made which see them as manifestations of Dickens himself; this is not always the case even when it seems like it or he claims it. What we have here is a complex, mature method of narrating the material: a mixture of fact and imagination, sometimes drawing on direct experience, sometimes offering more fanciful approaches. For Dickens, they had the advantage of keeping him before the public eye in the pages of his journal when he was not engaged in publishing a full-scale novel or directly in contact with the public through the public readings. An unsigned review appeared in the Saturday Review on 23 February 1861, thought by Philip Collins in Dickens: The Critical Heritage (1971) to be by James Fitzjames Stephen, praising the writing in the essays as “pleasant, witty, shrewd and unhackneyed. It treats of things that we like to read about, and in a manner that is peculiar to the writer.” For almost [End Page 247] a century the availability of these essays was in collected volumes. In 1958 the New Oxford Illustrated Dickens series published a volume combining these essays with “Reprinted Pieces” and other items and described by Leslie Staples, the editor, as “the polished prose of the established master.” The first annotated scholarly edition appeared over forty years later in 2000, in John Drew and Michael Slater’s volume 4 of the Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens’s Journalism, where they describe the Uncommercial Traveller essays as “some of his [Dickens’s] very finest work in this genre” (xx). Philip Drew in...

The international minimum: creativity and contradiction in Japan's global engagement, 1933-1964

The International Minimum is a history of internationalism, imperialism, and the performance of diplomacy in Japan at a time when new global norms required a minimum level of international engagement. Jessamyn Abel illuminates deep and nuanced connections between modes of diplomacy across periods of aggressive imperial expansion and times of peace from the 1930s to 1960s. Dispelling common assumptions of discordance between imperialism and internationalism, she convincingly demonstrates ways in which these worldviews complement each other. She offers innovative perspectives on the standard narrative of JapanAEs approach to multilateral cooperation in three ways: by seriously considering those international activities conducted outside of formal statelevel relations, by exploring cultural forms of international engagement, and by asserting the importance of rhetoric in cultivating what was then referred to as an ointernational mind.o In clear and polished prose, Abel identifies a continuous evolution of internationalist thought and activity in Japan that extends across the dark valley of war and the historiographical schism of defeat, bringing new modes of multilateral cooperation. Her book traces the practice and rhetoric of internationalism through epochal moments of JapanAEs twentieth-century international history, examining its withdrawal from the League of Nations and admission to the United Nations, the failed and successful attempts to host a Tokyo Olympiad, and wartime and postwar regional conferences in Tokyo and Bandung, Indonesia. Unpublished documents in government and private archives, together with the public discourse found in popular journals, books, newspapers, advertisements, poems, and songs, reveal historical layers of thought that helped delineate the realm of thepossible in imperial and postwar Japanese foreign policy. By bringing together materials of high diplomacy and mass culture, Abel offers a new view of internationalism and Japanese diplomacy since the early twentieth century.

Kazimierz Bartoszyński w Poznaniu

The author of this article discusses Kazimierz Bartoszynski’s didactic activity and writings, i.e. his doctoral thesis titled O powieściach Fryderyka Skarbka [On Fryderyk Skarbek’s Novels] (which was published in 1963) and his later articles on the gaweda (i.e. a story stylized as an oral tale) and historical novel (which are collected in the volume titled O polskich prozach powieściowych – slynnych i nieco zapomnianych [On Polish Prose Novels – Those Famous and Slightly Forgotten Ones] (2011)). These writings were a continuation of the studies of the 19th-century novel thathad been conducted in Poznan.