Edited books
Brill / Fink, 2022
Few ideas are as universally key, basic and primal as “home”. Few ideas require more attention an... more Few ideas are as universally key, basic and primal as “home”. Few ideas require more attention and new, critical re-examination in recognition of ongoing social change. In the post-pandemic and ecological reflection on how we live and approach “home” in its diverse definitions, engagement with this topic is only bound to grow in the future. This rapidly rising interest in the multidisciplinary field of housing studies is reflected also by our collection, which can be seen as an introduction to the entire research area thanks to the opening chapter, outlining its history and complexity. The following chapters by an international group of scholars representing different generations and methodological approaches examine some of the many meanings of home, houses or housing as they have been expressed in Western culture, not only across time but also across varied media: from traditional and digital theatre, through varied literary genres, to film and television, photography and street art.
Editors: Ewa Kowal and Izabela Curyłło-Klag.
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Edited by Ewa Kowal and Robert Kusek, Kraków: Jagiellonian University Press, 2017.
“Friend or ... more Edited by Ewa Kowal and Robert Kusek, Kraków: Jagiellonian University Press, 2017.
“Friend or foe?” is a perennial question, key for the survival of all animals, including humans. At times demanding an instant instinctive reaction, it also calls for deepened critical reflection. The volume’s twenty-two essays by scholars from France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Italy, Poland, and Turkey explore cultural representations of friendship in literary fiction and non-fiction, film, as well as other visual narratives. Collectively addressing general questions, such as: “What is a friend? What is friendship for? And what are its varieties/limits/costs?,” individually they examine a wide range of topics: friendship in theory from ancient Greeks to poststructuralist thinkers, friendship from the perspective of gender, intergenerational and interspecies friendship, queer friendship, friendship between historical figures, and between fictional characters conflicted by class or ethno-religious divisions. The volume features original studies of friendship between Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson, in Shakespeare, the WWI Poets, the Auden gang, as well as the meaning of friendship for Frances Burney, Frédéric Chopin, Jacques Derrida, E.M. Forster, Eva Hesse, and Mary Shelley, among others.
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Books
Jagiellonian University Press, 2019
Crisis defines the present cultural moment. From the environment, through migration, to democracy... more Crisis defines the present cultural moment. From the environment, through migration, to democracy, a continuous state of emergency engulfs us – so much so that crisis appears to be one of the few things not in crisis. The Post-Crash Decade of American Cinema: Wall Street, the “Mancession” and the Political Construction of Crisis focuses on two instances of this overwhelming trend: the latest masculinity crisis and what helped trigger it – the 2008 global financial crash. Looking at selected American cinematic texts of culture from the subsequent ten years, depicting both the causes of the crash and its victims, the volume offers answers to the questions: how has (popular) culture, in particular literature and film, responded to the greatest economic upheaval since the Great Depression, and what conclusions can be drawn from this response?
Timely, interdisciplinary and in-depth, this analysis combines literary and cultural studies, as well as feminist criticism, gender studies and masculinities studies with research on the latest history of political economy to interrelate such diverse phenomena as capitalism, “Wall Street culture,” the “Mancession” myth, Donald Trump, pornography, patriarchy, neoliberalism, precarity, postfeminism, the fourth wave of feminism, the #MeToo movement, 9/11, home, housing studies, positive psychology, and happiness studies. Ultimately, the book problematises the very concept of “crisis,” elucidating it as a powerful political construct.
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How can literature respond to a monumental event, unprecedented historically, politically and cul... more How can literature respond to a monumental event, unprecedented historically, politically and culturally, whose memory will forever be inseparable from its mass media coverage? How can writers represent what Jean Baudrillard called an "image-event"? In particular, what form can they use to convey the unspeakable - that was at the same time broadcast live across the globe? These questions are central to Ewa Kowal's comparative study of thirteen early post-9/11 novels. Written in four different Western countries between 2003 and 2007, during the now historical time of George W. Bush's "war on terror," the selected works provide the earliest literary reactions to the September 11,2001 terrorist attacks and/or their aftermath. Kowal examines them in a wider cultural context, focusing especially on audio-visual media, motifs of childhood and magical thinking as well as the destabilised division into reality and fiction. Offering an original reading of the whole body of work, the author places each analysed book on a scale according to its closeness to a terrorist attack, revealing a correspondence between the distance from the tragedy, the levels of danger and risk taken and the degree of formal (un)conventionality.
Discussed: 13 literary texts, mainly novels
2003
William Gibson, Pattern Recognition (American)
Frédéric Beigbeder, Windows on the World (French)
2004
Art Spiegelman, In the Shadow of No Towers (American)
Claire Tristram, After (American)
2005
Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (American)
Ian McEwan, Saturday (British)
Nick McDonell, The Third Brother (American)
Lynne Sharon Schwartz, The Writing on the Wall (American)
Wojciech Tochman, Córeńka (Polish)
Philip Beard, Dear Zoe (American)
2006
Jay McInerney, The Good Life (American)
John Updike, Terrorist (American)
2007
Don DeLillo, Falling Man (American)
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Published Papers in English
Polish Journal of English Studies, 2024
The aim of this paper is to analyse the question of a personal search for identity as well as the... more The aim of this paper is to analyse the question of a personal search for identity as well as the broader cultural concept of "feminine identity" in relation to domesticity and landscape in Deborah Levy's Real Estate, published in 2021. The third and last instalment of Levy's "A Living Autobiography" series is an account of a woman's search for identity in the context of major life changes: no longer a wife, no longer a mother living with her children, and no longer young, the narrator (who is and is not the author, according to Levy herself) examines her own relationship with home, homeland, and houses in various geographical locations, including her dream househer unreal estate. The spectral dream house, positioned at the intersection of the past, the present, and the future, together with land and a very specific type of fluid landscape, constitute an object of the narrator's profound desire. By expanding on the topic of this longing, Levy engages in reflection on women's wanting and its habitual subjugation to the needs of others. The paper demonstrates how in this way Levy enters into a dialogue with Sigmund Freud and his famous unanswered question "Was will das Weib?" Most importantly, it is shown how the narrator generally considers women's-including female artists'-place at home and in culture within patriarchy. Applying a feminist and gender studies perspective, as well as by combining hauntology with housing studies, this paper examines the key symbolism of Real Estate and ultimately reads the book as a feminist writer's manifesto declaring "my books are my real estate," while placing it against the background of older feminist tradition, represented
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Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture, 2023
Teddy Wayne's 2016 Loner tells the story of a Harvard freshman's sexual obsession with a fellow s... more Teddy Wayne's 2016 Loner tells the story of a Harvard freshman's sexual obsession with a fellow student, leading to stalking and attempted rape. On a deeper level, the campus novel can be interpreted as a critique of wider processes taking place in American academia and generally in the US: the mainstreaming of the so-called "woke" movement and the growing impact of "political correctness." The novel also reflects on class inequality, privilege, gender politics, the ongoing crisis of white (heterosexual) masculinity, toxic masculinity, and online "incel culture." The present paper will analyze the problematic "dialogic, but monologic" nature of the book's unreliable narrative addressing the above problems. The paper's goal will be to read Loner in light of the #MeToo movement as an illustration of the current stage of the now decades-long reckoning with rape culture, and with patriarchy.
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Polish Journal of English Studies 8.2, 2022
The purpose of this paper is to discuss Alison Bechdel's second graphic memoir, Are You My Mother... more The purpose of this paper is to discuss Alison Bechdel's second graphic memoir, Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama (2012) in order to analyse the American cartoonist's interest in myth, and her dialogic relationship with Virginia Woolf's autobiographical writings, in particular To the Lighthouse (1927). Bechdel's Are You My Mother? is first introduced via its brief comparison with Bechdel's debut memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006), devoted to her father. Then, the paper traces the parallels and differences between Bechdel's and Woolf's works and quests to examine their respective relationships with their own mothers. In both daughters' autobiographical writings, the mothers appear as mythical figures, who are subjected to demythicisation necessary for the daughters' liberation as artists. In addition, the paper discusses both authors' reflections on the process of artistic creation seen in Woolf's depiction of Lily Briscoe's painting and in Bechdel's own self-portrait. Finally, the paper demonstrates Bechdel's postmodernist intensification of Woolf's modernist, already self-reflexive model of writing, made possible thanks to the medium of the graphic narrative itself.
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The Many Meanings of Home: Cultural Representations of Housing across Media, 2022
In: The Many Meanings of Home: Cultural Representations of Housing across Media, eds. E. Kowal an... more In: The Many Meanings of Home: Cultural Representations of Housing across Media, eds. E. Kowal and I. Curyłło-Klag, Brilll Fink, 177-201.
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The Many Meanings of Home: Cultural Representations of Housing across Media , 2022
In: The Many Meanings of Home: Cultural Representations of Housing across Media, eds. E. Kowal an... more In: The Many Meanings of Home: Cultural Representations of Housing across Media, eds. E. Kowal and I. Curyłło-Klag, Brilll Fink, 143-158.
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The Many Meanings of Home: Cultural Representations of Housing across Media, 2022
In: The Many Meanings of Home: Cultural Representations of Housing across Media, eds. E. Kowal an... more In: The Many Meanings of Home: Cultural Representations of Housing across Media, eds. E. Kowal and I. Curyłło-Klag, Brilll Fink, xi-xxxi.
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Sex in the States: Media, Literature, and Discourse, 2022
In "The Heart Goes Last," her 2015 dystopian novel set in the US in the near future, Margaret Atw... more In "The Heart Goes Last," her 2015 dystopian novel set in the US in the near future, Margaret Atwood addresses the topic of the post-2008-financial-crisis Great Recession, imagining what a complete collapse of the capitalist economic system could look like somewhere in America. Most critics appear to regret that “this potentially insightful novel about unbridled capitalism” “deflates into a flaccid sex comedy” and really is “a silly mess.” In my paper, I demonstrate that this dismissal of the novel’s central issues of sex and gender as trivial and unrelated to economy is misguided. Turning her attention to marriage and sex Atwood never does abandon the important and timely subject of post-crisis (and always crisis-genic) capitalism. On the contrary, the “rich satire’s” sexual excesses of the rich serve as a hyperbole for the obscene consumption and perverse power of the real “1%.” Furthermore, Atwood highlights the importance of traditional gender roles in maintaining the system's security through a stable heteronormative family unit generating consumers predictable in their consumption from the cradle to the grave. Finally, by speaking about both capitalism and marriage as prison and by putting a suburban housewife side by side with neuroengineered sex slaves and sex robots, Atwood offers a critique of not only American late capitalism, but also the much larger and much older system that contains it: patriarchy.
In: Sex in the States: Media, Literature, and Discourse, edited by Tadeusz Lewandowski and Sławomir Kuźnicki. Opole: Uniwersytet Opolski, 2022, pp. 130-154.
(Apologies for the uncomfortable format of the PDF.)
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Polish Journal of English Studies, 2021
The aims of the paper are twofold. Firstly, it analyses Benjamin Markovits' 2015 novel You Don't ... more The aims of the paper are twofold. Firstly, it analyses Benjamin Markovits' 2015 novel You Don't Have to Live Like This as an example of the nascent genre of the "Obama-era novel." Set in Detroit during Obama's supposedly post-racial presidency, Markovits' work offers a critical assessment of its legacy and addresses the problem of growing racial tensions reflecting both the beginnings of the Black Lives Matter movement and the most recent crisis of white masculinity. Secondly, the novel is read as a literary response to the economic aftermath of the Great Recession following the 2008 global financial crisis. The novel's depiction of a fictitious corporate-run scheme attempting Detroit's urban revitalisation is interpreted as a critique of the "Yes, we can" culture about to be replaced by the "Trump-era," which the novel anticipates. Finally, the novel is compared to other examples of "crash fiction"; it is argued that Markovits' work is a rare example of literature's deeper and direct engagement with the recent economic crisis. https://pjes.edu.pl/issues/7-1-2021/
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Polish Journal of English Studies 6.1, 2020
The aim of this paper is to analyse Mohsin Hamid's 2017 Exit West as a literary response to the 2... more The aim of this paper is to analyse Mohsin Hamid's 2017 Exit West as a literary response to the 2015 migrant crisis. Hamid's fourth novel will be shown as, on the one hand, a formal departure from his previous works, but on the other, a continuation of the most important thematic threads in the author's output. The paper demonstrates how Hamid takes on the risky chal lenge of capturing the migrant experience by offering a nuanced response to the refugee crisis, which opens up the novel to interpretations from the perspectives of postcolonial studies, trauma theory, and socioliterature. Fur thermore, Hamid's use of the technique of magical realism will be examined as a metaphor and an ellipsis; however, it will be argued that the novel's politically subversive potential lies elsewhere: in the formally realist vision of an optimistic resolution to the migrant crisis. This ending, for many read ers unrealistic and fantastical, if not "magical," offers a "radical political en gagement with the future," as it provides the author's unflagging expression of support for what he calls "impurity," as well as his appeal for strategic hope and optimism in the face of the currently dominant political discourse of fear and division. http://pjes.edu.pl/issues/6-1-2020/
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Polish Journal of English Studies, 2019
James Lasdun's pre-#MeToo novel The Horned Man (2002) tells the story of a British academic, Lawr... more James Lasdun's pre-#MeToo novel The Horned Man (2002) tells the story of a British academic, Lawrence Miller, teaching Gender Studies at a college in upstate New York, where he is also a member of the Sexual Harassment Committee. Reflecting on sexual politics at a US university campus, and a broader "continental drift of the sexes", involving the "engineering [of] the New Male", Miller's first-person account both chronicles the changing reality in the West at the turn of the 21 st century, and departs from reality, as it becomes increasingly unreliable and Kafkaesque. Tracing the novel's intertextual and cultural references, the paper interprets the complicated and confusing tale of confusion, suspected conspiracy, mistaken and appropriated identity, cross-dressing and femicide as a symbolic expression of a struggle between "new" and "old" masculinity. Lasdun's prescient engagement with issues which in the "real world" had to wait almost two decades for the emergence of the #MeToo movement to become widely discussed is read from a feminist perspective as a representation of the ongoing tortuous process of transition towards more equitable gender relations.
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Brno Studies in English, 2019
The paper is a comparative study of Margaret Atwood's 2015 dystopian novel The Heart Goes Last an... more The paper is a comparative study of Margaret Atwood's 2015 dystopian novel The Heart Goes Last and the 2016 HBO science-fiction TV series Westworld (Season 1) created by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy. Drawing upon Susan Fa-ludi's The Terror Dream and Marita Sturken's Tourists of History, the paper fo-cuses on the American frontier myth, and the concepts of nostalgia and kitsch (in particular, Sturken's symbol of the snow globe) to analyse both works as cultural reactions to the recent Great Recession. While both analysed works can be said to reflect an anxiety about the growing class gap and express resentment against the rich, they respond differently to the popular demand for comfort in times of crisis. While Westworld uplifts with a vicarious experience of the underdog's emancipation, Atwood's satire ironically withholds a happy ending, providing readers with a lesson and a challenge instead.
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Kwartalnik Neofilologiczny , 2018
In this comparative study of Angela Carter's " The Lady of the House of Love " (1979) and Werner ... more In this comparative study of Angela Carter's " The Lady of the House of Love " (1979) and Werner Herzog's Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (1979) eating habits, relation to the domestic and to (ir)rationality are examined in the female and male characters in both works to show how their authors create gender hybridity. Drawing upon Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), the article proposes that the hybridity reproduces patriarchal transfer of power.
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Published in "9/11 in European Literature: Negotiating Identities Against the Attacks and What Fo... more Published in "9/11 in European Literature: Negotiating Identities Against the Attacks and What Followed," ed. Svenja Frank, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
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Published in The Politics and Poetics of Friendship, ed. Ewa Kowal and Robert Kusek, Kraków: Jagi... more Published in The Politics and Poetics of Friendship, ed. Ewa Kowal and Robert Kusek, Kraków: Jagiellonian University Press, 2017, pp. 297-308.
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The article examines Mohsin Hamid's third novel, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013), by... more The article examines Mohsin Hamid's third novel, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013), by focusing on the problem of filth, understood metaphorically, in moral and formal terms, but above all literally, in terms of actual pollution and lack of access to clean water in the economically fastest growing region, plagued by disastrous social inequality. The novel, written in the form of a second-person self-help guidebook, is analysed against the background of the Pakistani author's whole literary output. Drawing upon anthropological and philosophical/sociological studies, Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger as well as Zygmunt Bauman's Wasted Lives and Liquid Fear, the article presents Hamid's ecologically and ethically engaged work as itself an impure, hybrid text which, like all of Hamid's writings, challenges the " centre " vs. " margins " hierarchy, and is characterised by a boundary-blurring, and system-changing ambition.
Published in Acta Philologica 51-52, Wydział Neofilologii Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego / the Faculty of Modern Languages at the University of Warsaw, 2017, pp. 71-80.
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Drawing upon Mary Douglas’s anthropological work Purity and Danger,
Jay David Bolter’s Writing Sp... more Drawing upon Mary Douglas’s anthropological work Purity and Danger,
Jay David Bolter’s Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation
of Print, and (to a lesser extent) Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto,”
the article analyses the form and authorship of James Lasdun’s 2013 memoir
Give Me Everything You Have. On Being Stalked. The book is Lasdun’s account
of his experience of being cyberstalked by his former female student.
The article proposes that the memoir be read as a combination of two kinds
of texts, indeed a fusion of two writing technologies (the print/book technology
and the digital technology) resulting from a collision – or even an involuntary
“collaboration” (a concept considered on the basis of its discussion
by George P. Landow in his Hypertext 3.0) – of two very different (co-)authors:
a more traditional author who is a digital “alien” and a disembodied and viral
cyberstalker (a self-proclaimed “verbal terrorist”) who is a native-like digital
immigrant. The article examines the book’s hypertextual qualities, proposing
that it takes a step further in comparison to the protohypertextuality of experimental
authors such as Sterne, Joyce, Borges and Calvino by actually including
electronic text within its paper borders – which, in fact, become opened
up as a result.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
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Editors: Ewa Kowal and Izabela Curyłło-Klag.
“Friend or foe?” is a perennial question, key for the survival of all animals, including humans. At times demanding an instant instinctive reaction, it also calls for deepened critical reflection. The volume’s twenty-two essays by scholars from France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Italy, Poland, and Turkey explore cultural representations of friendship in literary fiction and non-fiction, film, as well as other visual narratives. Collectively addressing general questions, such as: “What is a friend? What is friendship for? And what are its varieties/limits/costs?,” individually they examine a wide range of topics: friendship in theory from ancient Greeks to poststructuralist thinkers, friendship from the perspective of gender, intergenerational and interspecies friendship, queer friendship, friendship between historical figures, and between fictional characters conflicted by class or ethno-religious divisions. The volume features original studies of friendship between Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson, in Shakespeare, the WWI Poets, the Auden gang, as well as the meaning of friendship for Frances Burney, Frédéric Chopin, Jacques Derrida, E.M. Forster, Eva Hesse, and Mary Shelley, among others.
Timely, interdisciplinary and in-depth, this analysis combines literary and cultural studies, as well as feminist criticism, gender studies and masculinities studies with research on the latest history of political economy to interrelate such diverse phenomena as capitalism, “Wall Street culture,” the “Mancession” myth, Donald Trump, pornography, patriarchy, neoliberalism, precarity, postfeminism, the fourth wave of feminism, the #MeToo movement, 9/11, home, housing studies, positive psychology, and happiness studies. Ultimately, the book problematises the very concept of “crisis,” elucidating it as a powerful political construct.
Discussed: 13 literary texts, mainly novels
2003
William Gibson, Pattern Recognition (American)
Frédéric Beigbeder, Windows on the World (French)
2004
Art Spiegelman, In the Shadow of No Towers (American)
Claire Tristram, After (American)
2005
Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (American)
Ian McEwan, Saturday (British)
Nick McDonell, The Third Brother (American)
Lynne Sharon Schwartz, The Writing on the Wall (American)
Wojciech Tochman, Córeńka (Polish)
Philip Beard, Dear Zoe (American)
2006
Jay McInerney, The Good Life (American)
John Updike, Terrorist (American)
2007
Don DeLillo, Falling Man (American)
In: Sex in the States: Media, Literature, and Discourse, edited by Tadeusz Lewandowski and Sławomir Kuźnicki. Opole: Uniwersytet Opolski, 2022, pp. 130-154.
(Apologies for the uncomfortable format of the PDF.)
Published in Acta Philologica 51-52, Wydział Neofilologii Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego / the Faculty of Modern Languages at the University of Warsaw, 2017, pp. 71-80.
Jay David Bolter’s Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation
of Print, and (to a lesser extent) Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto,”
the article analyses the form and authorship of James Lasdun’s 2013 memoir
Give Me Everything You Have. On Being Stalked. The book is Lasdun’s account
of his experience of being cyberstalked by his former female student.
The article proposes that the memoir be read as a combination of two kinds
of texts, indeed a fusion of two writing technologies (the print/book technology
and the digital technology) resulting from a collision – or even an involuntary
“collaboration” (a concept considered on the basis of its discussion
by George P. Landow in his Hypertext 3.0) – of two very different (co-)authors:
a more traditional author who is a digital “alien” and a disembodied and viral
cyberstalker (a self-proclaimed “verbal terrorist”) who is a native-like digital
immigrant. The article examines the book’s hypertextual qualities, proposing
that it takes a step further in comparison to the protohypertextuality of experimental
authors such as Sterne, Joyce, Borges and Calvino by actually including
electronic text within its paper borders – which, in fact, become opened
up as a result.
Editors: Ewa Kowal and Izabela Curyłło-Klag.
“Friend or foe?” is a perennial question, key for the survival of all animals, including humans. At times demanding an instant instinctive reaction, it also calls for deepened critical reflection. The volume’s twenty-two essays by scholars from France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Italy, Poland, and Turkey explore cultural representations of friendship in literary fiction and non-fiction, film, as well as other visual narratives. Collectively addressing general questions, such as: “What is a friend? What is friendship for? And what are its varieties/limits/costs?,” individually they examine a wide range of topics: friendship in theory from ancient Greeks to poststructuralist thinkers, friendship from the perspective of gender, intergenerational and interspecies friendship, queer friendship, friendship between historical figures, and between fictional characters conflicted by class or ethno-religious divisions. The volume features original studies of friendship between Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson, in Shakespeare, the WWI Poets, the Auden gang, as well as the meaning of friendship for Frances Burney, Frédéric Chopin, Jacques Derrida, E.M. Forster, Eva Hesse, and Mary Shelley, among others.
Timely, interdisciplinary and in-depth, this analysis combines literary and cultural studies, as well as feminist criticism, gender studies and masculinities studies with research on the latest history of political economy to interrelate such diverse phenomena as capitalism, “Wall Street culture,” the “Mancession” myth, Donald Trump, pornography, patriarchy, neoliberalism, precarity, postfeminism, the fourth wave of feminism, the #MeToo movement, 9/11, home, housing studies, positive psychology, and happiness studies. Ultimately, the book problematises the very concept of “crisis,” elucidating it as a powerful political construct.
Discussed: 13 literary texts, mainly novels
2003
William Gibson, Pattern Recognition (American)
Frédéric Beigbeder, Windows on the World (French)
2004
Art Spiegelman, In the Shadow of No Towers (American)
Claire Tristram, After (American)
2005
Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (American)
Ian McEwan, Saturday (British)
Nick McDonell, The Third Brother (American)
Lynne Sharon Schwartz, The Writing on the Wall (American)
Wojciech Tochman, Córeńka (Polish)
Philip Beard, Dear Zoe (American)
2006
Jay McInerney, The Good Life (American)
John Updike, Terrorist (American)
2007
Don DeLillo, Falling Man (American)
In: Sex in the States: Media, Literature, and Discourse, edited by Tadeusz Lewandowski and Sławomir Kuźnicki. Opole: Uniwersytet Opolski, 2022, pp. 130-154.
(Apologies for the uncomfortable format of the PDF.)
Published in Acta Philologica 51-52, Wydział Neofilologii Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego / the Faculty of Modern Languages at the University of Warsaw, 2017, pp. 71-80.
Jay David Bolter’s Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation
of Print, and (to a lesser extent) Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto,”
the article analyses the form and authorship of James Lasdun’s 2013 memoir
Give Me Everything You Have. On Being Stalked. The book is Lasdun’s account
of his experience of being cyberstalked by his former female student.
The article proposes that the memoir be read as a combination of two kinds
of texts, indeed a fusion of two writing technologies (the print/book technology
and the digital technology) resulting from a collision – or even an involuntary
“collaboration” (a concept considered on the basis of its discussion
by George P. Landow in his Hypertext 3.0) – of two very different (co-)authors:
a more traditional author who is a digital “alien” and a disembodied and viral
cyberstalker (a self-proclaimed “verbal terrorist”) who is a native-like digital
immigrant. The article examines the book’s hypertextual qualities, proposing
that it takes a step further in comparison to the protohypertextuality of experimental
authors such as Sterne, Joyce, Borges and Calvino by actually including
electronic text within its paper borders – which, in fact, become opened
up as a result.
(Apologies for the PDF quality.)
Powieść irlandzka w XXI wieku to zaproszenie do zapoznania się z bogactwem i różnorodnością prozy irlandzkiej początku XXI wieku. Autorzy zgromadzonych w książce artykułów analizują jedenaście powieści autorstwa znanych i cenionych w Polsce powieściopisarzy (John Banville, John McGahern, Edna O’Brien, Colm Tóibín), a także twórców z rzadka tłumaczonych (Anne Enright, Emma Donoghue) oraz tych, którzy jak dotąd w ogóle nie zaistnieli na polskim rynku wydawniczym (Eimear McBride, Alan Monaghan). Geografia i autobiografia, globalność i lokalność, przemoc i żałoba, pamięć i historia to najważniejsze z tematów podejmowanych w przedstawionych tu powieściach. Autorzy artykułów ukazują rozmaite ujęcia tej problematyki, równocześnie dokonując analizy formalnej omawianych utworów i oferując przegląd refleksji krytycznoliterackich na ich temat.
Powieść brytyjska w XXI wieku. Szkice stanowi zaproszenie do podjęcia refleksji nad stanem i kondycją postmilenialnej prozy w Wielkiej Brytanii i jej statusu na początku XXI wieku. Czy współczesna powieść brytyjska to tylko produkt „długiego wieku XX”, czy też obszar nowych literackich przemian i przewartościowań? Czy jest ona nadal fenomenem globalnym, a Wielka Brytania niezmiennie pozostaje najważniejszą światową „fabryką prozy”? Czy na początku XXI wieku powieść brytyjska zachowała wszystkie różnicujące ją niegdyś parametry, takie jak: masowość zjawiska, ideologiczny pluralizm, zafascynowanie procesem historycznym, a także szczególne przywiązanie do kategorii realizmu? A może jej atrybuty są dzisiaj zupełnie inne? Próbę odpowiedzi na te pytania stanowi zbiór piętnastu esejów zawartych w książce. Oferują one nie tylko przegląd dorobku cenionych współczesnych pisarek i pisarzy z Wielkiej Brytanii, ale i oryginalną analizę omawianych powieści. Eksperyment literacki spotyka się tutaj z typową narracją realistyczną, powieść historyczna i auto/biografia z queerem, a klasycy literatury brytyjskiej końca XX wieku z debiutującymi na początku XXI wieku nowymi głosami i nadziejami współczesnej prozy brytyjskiej.