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.
