The author discusses the second edition of Filip Springer’s collection of reportage-essays Wanna z kolumnadą. Reportaże o polskiej przestrzeni [Bathtub with a colonnade. Reportages on Polish space] from the perspective of the poetics of photographic experience. Springer’s work (the author of Miedzianka) is often reduced to the statement that he points out the paradoxes of space. However, in the case of Wanna z kolumnadą, the landscape turns out to be a multi-level, palimpsest experience, discovered and described by means of photographs and statistics, legal texts and residents’ accounts. As a result, space becomes not so much an object of analysis, but rather evidence in a case against Polish law and Polish reality.
The article characterizes one of the non-visual approaches to landscape – the edible landscape. The term, introduced to describe home gardens combining aesthetic and utilitarian values, is treated by the author as a starting point for identifying landscapes where the cultural component is weakened in favor of the environmental one. The author uses the concept of ecosystem services and tracks how provisioning, supporting, and regulatory functions are realized in the landscape. In the first part of the article, the author presents research tools (new materialism, dark ecology, ecosystem services). Edible landscapes are interpreted as practices of “hacking the Anthropocene” – deconstructing agrologistics techniques. In the second part of the article, the author creates a typology of edible landscapes present in 21st-century Polish prose, which includes: the landscape of consumption, edible mnemotopos, terroir, urban garden. The author considers the works of D. Słowik, M. Lebda, J. Fiedorczuk, M. Płaza, Ł. Barys, K. Fedorowicz, A. Muszyński, Ł. Łuczaj, M. Książek. The edible landscape is considered as an adequate way of literary manifestation of nature in the Anthropocene era, and at the same time, in the form of urban gardening, an intervention practice aimed at socio-environmental justice. Consequently, the edible landscape is seen as a landscape enabling survival in the face of ecological catastrophe. At the same time, the environmental/climatic profile of early 21st-century Polish prose is noted.
The heroine of The Bus Leaves at 6:20 (1954) by Jan Rybkowski leaves behind the stuffy space of a small town: small houses, courtyards, cobbled streets and a small market square where a carousel has just set up. The beginning of Rybkowski’s film brings one of the first neorealist images of every day life, which, however, has to give way to socialist realist landscapes: the smoking chimneys of factories and steelworks in Silesia will provide the heroine with dignity and freedom. Small towns were included in this and similar dichotomies: freedom – enslavement, persistence – change, and even political – private, also in subsequent films of this decade, although these categories, depending on the author’s strategy or the dominant social mood, were assigned different values and given different meanings. In Winter Twilight by Stanisław Lenartowicz, The Small Town (both 1956) by Jerzy Ziarnik, The Small Town (1958/1960) by Romuald Drobaczyński, Julian Dziedzina and Janusz Łęski, the third novella of Cross of Valour (1958) and Nobody’s Calling (1960) by Kazimierz Kutz, the space of the town and its material reality influenced the way of life of the protagonists, became evidence of the fall, a closed circle from which one cannot escape, but also contributed to the in validation of the political perspective and allowed for a different passage of time and way of life.
Article titled „Absorbing life to the fullest” – the subject as a „prop”( towards existence) in the poetry of Natalia Dzierżkówna presents the strategies of the lytic subject in the poetry of the artist from Podolia, the stages of overcoming the fears of existence, and the existence of a „prop” in a world perceived as a palimpsest (a large prop room). Natalia Dzierżkówna’s poetic work is vitalistic and dominated by figures such as repetition, paradox, chiasm, which describe ways of coping with the experience of internal imprisonment. An alternative to the existence of a „prop”, a unreflective ex istence among other „props”, include the processes of self-improvement and creativity. These are important components of modern vitalism, which foreshadowed twentieth-century perspectivism.
The article discusses two cases of using the technique of expanding or shrinking the narrative settingof a literary work in order to intensify reader’s emotions of unease and uncertainty through referencesto agoraphobic or claustrophobic fears. The analysis of selected themes from works dedicated toyoung readers – Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak and The Black Book by Rita Kaczmarska – shows how the language text and illustrations co-create stories for children that draw from horror motifs. The authors, seemingly frightening the readers with monsters or darkness, actuallyevoke additional fears related to space, thus making transformations of the landscape backgroundof both plots an essential tool of the poetics of horror.
This article presents artistic practices that utilize algorithmic techniques, emerging at the intersection of art, science, and technology. It seems that artists employ algorithms: 1) to create graphic formats (both static and dynamic); 2) to perform supervisory functions related to controlling devices and objects, as well as controlling their scope of operation; and 3) to design communication patterns (between machines and between machines and humans). In addition to expanding the scope of experimentation, algorithms implemented in artistic practices also prompt a reassessment of fundamental aesthetic concepts. They pose questions from the cognitive universe that interest representatives of numerous disciplines (humanities, philosophy, computer science, and technical sciences). Their goal is not only to attempt to domesticate exotic practices but also to reflect on ways of thinking about them and methods of researching them.
The article analyses the function performed by a prop (specifically a man’s cane) in Bolesław Prus’s story. The analysis leads to the conclusion that the prop is an unrecognizable substitute for a person. It plays the role of a so-called double authority: it is what the owner would like to be and sets new objects of desire for him.
This paper discusses attitudes towards the southern Calabrian landscape as described in Bruno Casile’s poetry collection Strafonghia sto Skotidi (A Light in the Darkness, 1991). It demonstrates that the experience of the landscape, related to the lives of shepherds and farmers and expressed in the vernacular, oral Greek-Calabrian language, is rooted in the tradition of folk songs and distinct from the approach of the elites (Edward Lear, Antonio Marzano). It is argued that Casile seeks in the multigenerational engagement with the landscape a source of Greek-Calabrian identity, combining class consciousness and a narrative of the linguistic minority’s shared origin. The interpretations of Casile’s poetry contribute to discussions about the meanings of vernacular (social, participatory) landscapes and the class dimension of aesthetic landscape experience.
The article is dedicated the work of Hermann Hesse, with a particular focus on the representations of the newcomer figure within them. By analyzing two of his novels – Peter Camenzind (1904) and Siddhartha (1922) – the author seeks to define the specificity of this figure and the narrative-philosophical similarities between the two works. A particularly important issue is the broadly understood problem of wandering and how it is implemented by individual characters in the novel. The author also juxtaposes the German prose writer’s viewpoint with the thought of European philosophers, such as Emmanuel Lévinas or Bernhard Waldenfels, as their inquiries also focus on the problem of meeting the other and the possible interactions that an individual can adopt to make the titular stranger part of a given community without giving up their own identity.
This article explores the concept of intermediality in the context of contemporary film adaptations. As the author argues, this category not only highlights the necessity of considering multiple media in the analysis of adaptation processes, but also serves as an effective tool for describing specific contemporary narrative strategies. The study focuses on Dorota Masłowska’s novel Other People (Inni ludzie), and its adaptation by Aleksandra Terpińska. The author examines how Masłowska and Terpińska employ literary and cinematic means of expression to create intermedial references to the discourse of hiphop. The analysis aims not only to demonstrate the dynamic interaction between different media forms, but also to show the potential of intermedial references as a tool for social critique. According to the author, Other People is not an example of remediation in the strict sense, but rather of reflective intermediality, which encourages to examine the referenced discourse from a critical distance.
The article deals with the variability and dynamics of spacescapes understood as narratives encoded in cosmic views. Starting from the definition formulated by Alice Gorman, the author analyses three BBC series devoted to the exploration of the Solar System: The Planets (1999), Wonders of the Solar System (2010) and The Planets (2019), proving that spacescapes appear in all of them, but their roles differ. In The Planets from 1999, we encounter a narrative of technological sublimity; in Wonders of the Solar System – an Arcadian tale; and in the 2019 series – a narrative of terraforming other worlds. In the first part of the article, the author discusses selected issues of practices of space-making and studying cosmic landscapes. Then, using the example of three series produced by the BBC, she shows the dominant narratives embedded in the cosmogenic images present in contemporary high-budget space docs. Importantly, the narratives of technological sublimity, terraforming and Arcadianism are not mutually exclusive, but are closely related. In their evolution, they seem to follow the direction set by Gorman’s definition: while The Planets from 1999 primarily emphasise the ‘terrestrial’ elements of the vertical landscape, Wonders of the Solar System emphasise orbital shots in the style of The Blue Marble, and The Planets from 2019 show us places that have so far only been visited by unmanned space probes.
Although the artistic projects of Richard Mosse (Broken Spectre), Nicolas Gourault (Unknown Label) and Jeremy Kamal (Mojo: Da Floods) differ in form and subject matter, they all focus on the variously understood landscape and the complex network of relations between humans, nature and new technologies that emerges in it. These projects make visible what usually remains invisible, especially in the context of the sources of what we have recently called the polycrisis. They are also proof that contemporary art, through the use of new technologies, is able to confront us in an innovative way with the grim realities of the Anthropocene and Mortonian hyperobjects such as global warming, artificial intelligence and Western colonialism.
The article outlines a possibility of analyzing the spatial experience of the film character. The first part presents important theories of experienced space taken from philosophy, cultural geography and literature studies, while also noting a lack of such concepts in film theory. The second part aims to fill this gap and provide tools for the systematic analysis of spatial experience in film. Most importantly, the terms ‘widening world’ and ‘narrowed world’ are proposed and discussed using selected film examples.
This article addresses the use of psychological knowledge in literary research throughout history. It analyses the methods of literary research from different eras in terms of the possibility of relating their elements to what is nowadays understood as the ‘psychology of literature’. At the same time, it proposes a broader understanding of both psychology and literary research, including a pre-scientific approach. The aim of the analysis is to observe more accurately than before the role of broad psychological knowledge in the development and application of the various theories of literary research.
What is the significance of the tragic myth in our contemporary times? What role can tragedy still play as a narrative element today? This article considers the presence and significance of the tragic myth in the heroic franchises of today’s cultural industry
The article Anthroposcenicity. Landscape as a New Climate Narrative examines the challenges of representing climate disasters and the Anthropocene in visual culture. Using the case of the 2024 floods in Poland as a starting point, it highlights the limitations of traditional media in capturing the scale and processual nature of environmental crises. The author explores how cinema moves away from the narratives of Hollywood disaster films – which often reinforce anthropocentric perspectives – and presents alternative approaches that allow for the dehierarchization of the human viewpoint. Drawing on the concepts of Andrzej Marzec, Timothy Morton, and David Matless, the article introduces the term anthroposcenicity as a framework for rethinking film aesthetics in the Anthropocene. By analyzing films that expand spatial and temporal scales, the text emphasizes the potential of cinema to shift narratives from an anthropocentric perspective to ecological and posthumanist storytelling.
This article introduces the idea of a landscape with a prop in the background, bridging the reflections on two main themes explored in previous issues: conceptualizing landscape research as a new transdiscipline, and the prop as an intertwining of object, word, and body. This relational approach to a landscape that “absorbs” the “other” justifies synthesising reflections on space with the role of the prop
The aim of this article is to present the concept of the discovery of landscape as formulated by Karatani Kōjin in his seminal work Origins of Modern Japanese Literature. Karatani’s theoretical proposal remains an important contribution to the debate on the historicity of the basic concepts used to describe the world. He points to the direct connection between modern subjectivity and the relationship to the outside world, arguing that the breakthrough in the epistemological constellation in Japan took place in the third decade of the Meiji era. I present his views against the background of the earlier observations of Shiga Shigetaka and Watsuji Tetsurō.
In this article I analyze the motif of landscape in the poetry of Tomasz Różycki in the context of post-memory and geopoetics referring to the history of Eastern Europe. I am interested in the category of the poet undertaken by Różycki – the heir of the lost landscapes of his grandparents, marked by emptiness, the tension between the past and the present, between the known and the lost. I am particularly interested here in the poem Spalone mapy as a record of the affective experience of the landscape, which is an attempt to regain ties with a lost place and history of one’s ancestors.
The article discusses the penis motif in Szczepan Twardoch’s work, situating the issue in the broad context of contemporary culture and literature, as well as offering a theoretical interpretation inspired by psychoanalysis.
