Masthead and table of contents of the issue.

Er(r)go… ,

…“Who the fuck am I?” asks Nick Cave, and there’s no denying that it is a vital question. To which we could reply, “**** *** ****, Nick, check out your biographies and autobiographies, and you’ll know,” but Adam Zagajewski nullifies our hope: “I is the I of ignorance, the I who understands nothing.” I “is me, and I am it, but it would accept no one, not even me.” (I omitted the ellipses). And yet, in bio-graphies and autobiographies, we keep searching: who is she, who is he, who is this “I” of theirs?

Not an easy question to answer, though, for everywhere there lurk phantom biographies, biographical novels, hypothetical biographies, bio-fictions, (auto)biographies and auto/biographies, female relational auto/biographies, automythographies, autofictions, life-nature-writing, self-portraits, transmedia autobiographies and dispersed autobiographies, diaries, memoirs, hagiographies, biographical monodramas, testimony-monodramas and reconstruction-monodramas, (ordinary) life-writing and LIFE-writing, non-anthropocentric life-writing, anthropodecentred life-writing, relational life-writing, and around all these circulate allobiographical, autopathographical and autothanatographical idioms, biopoetics and (somato/bio)poetics, biographical cover-ups and displacements, let alone auto-fictional discourses and life-scarratives. The “I” doesn’t seem to be doing very well in this jam.

As we can see, language and intellect wouldn’t let us moulder, and so weighty and less weighty questions multiply. Is Biography True? What is the relationship between the life lived and the life written? How does a structuralist love? Can one truly love without hope? Have our souls ever seen the impossible? What is the interpretive value in linking text to life? Who would ever guess from Recherche that Proust had a brother? How does the private and biological body transform into a media body? Are we left but with absurdity and lost hope? Does a biographer need inspiration? Is a biographer a literary vulture? Or perhaps a voyeur?

It is not easy to focus on the answers for a variety of different beings, non-beings, incidents and characters weave themselves into the course of the argument: embryonic being and absolute being, sinister doppelgängers, a nameless guru-god with a red right hand, a wanderer-philosopher, bodies swollen with hunger, damaged memory tissues, assemblages, old cast-iron mangles, a gymnastic goat, women’s shoes, a limbless doll and a sculpture of a woman’s head, blowhard erudites and prejudiced critics, incessant chatter camouflaging silence, a naked female body in a glass cube, ornamental medievalists, identity usurpation and catoptric identity, incest of identification, cyber-taverns, abjectal closeness to someone else’s body, a paranoid eternal now, and – how else – squishing, pinching, plucking, pulling, tearing, stroking, slicing, pressing, bending, shaking. And next to it, four Pulitzer Prize Winners stand by and watch.

It’s impossible to write everything down here, but interesting things happen in this issue’s textual world. Half-naked papa runs about a swampland overgrown with thorny palms with a long knife and a rifle in his hands, Biographers sing long songs, a poet diegetically informs us of the consistent equivalence taking place in his life, and Nabokov, with 29 suitcases, calls a porter in the middle of nowhere. In the same space-time, the flaneuress leaves the city, the hounded mute submerges in the swamp as in amniotic fluid, nine eyes stare at everything with the same intensity, and the humanists – convinced that they were worthless freeloaders – fall into collective depression. And a very disturbing thing: Socrates puts on shoes, Jason has only one sandal, while Eros remains barefoot. At the same time, two life-writers, father and son, engage in a dialogue about life, creativity, and autism, Tsing talks about man through the prism of the Japanese matsutake mushroom, a stranger lunges himself at the narrator with a syringe, someone squeezes pus out of a wound by means of a reference to Plato’s single-bodies, while an actress peels herself away from her role. Barthes deconstructs himself, expresses himself obliquely and leaves traces. KURYLUK speaks through Kuryluk, deceives the reader, camouflages biography and bypasses the opposition of truth and falsehood, the double adheres to the extra-textual authoress, maintaining the dialectic of camouflage and exhibitionism, the subject is afraid of losing their lover, the idiot-savant comments on her own dream, while Eve rejects the Freudian interpretation and is tormented by her tangled tongue. And beware: one lady wants to – just like that – enter someone’s soul through their bowel.

But, as the Sculptor says, “All this should be regarded as pure hypothesis.”

Wojciech Kalaga
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4874-9734

P.S. The first – “American” – part of the issue is exceptional and unusual for Er(r)go:
we have gathered voices and conversations of outstanding biographers-practitioners (among them four Pulitzer Prize winners), who share with our Readers their reflections from the inside of the biographical process. This part was realized with sthe support of the grant from the Metropolitan Science and Education Support Fund of the Upper Silesian and Zagłębie Metropolis, application number 2/2021 – project entitled “Metropolis for Metropolis, or the New York Pulitzer Prize winner for Silesia and Zagłębie.”

Drawing upon the theoretical writings of Tzvetan Todorov and Georg Lukács on the subject of the novel, this essay argues for more widespread recognition of the biography as a literary genre. It frames the genre of biography as a genre of radical incompleteness, discussing the search for verisimilitude and the tendency toward fragmentation in the biographer’s pursuit — a quality that describes not only the biographer’s sources, but also the contingent, broken nature of the intellectual and emotional space that both the biographical subject and the biographer herself inhabit.

Taking as a starting point the events of Donald Trump’s presidency, the healthcare crisis caused by the outbreak of Covid-19 pandemic, and the perception of the United States of America as a (fading) symbol of democracy, this essay investigates whether a balanced discussion on the contemporary image of America is still possible. As it is argued, such a balanced view might be achieved thanks to the genre of biography. Therefore, a subjective selection of biographies contributing to this view is presented, starting with those dedicated to Alexander Hamilton and George Washington and ending with the ones focusing on Michelle and Barack Obama; as it is shown, they allow us to investigate the complicated personages who contributed to the contemporary image of America.

On March 25, 2015, The Center for the Study of Transformative Lives at New York University and the NYU Biography Seminar co-hosted a panel discussion titled Is Biography True? Introduced by Philip Kunhardt and hosted by the late James Atlas, the panel featured three Pulitzer Prize-winning biographers: Ron Chernow, author of Washington: A Life; John Matteson, author of Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and her Father; and Stacy Schiff, author of Vera, Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov. The following is a transcript of that discussion.]

Responding to the distrust in biography, widely accepted in literary studies, this article attempts to rethink the relationship between the reader and the author, with a special emphasis put on the role of the biographer. Such a task might help us read such texts authored by Herman Melville as Pierre; or The Ambiguities, which tend to raise our amazement and anxiety with their autobiographical entanglement. Moreover, the analyses of reading habits of the Melville family are crucial if we endeavour to understand Herman Melville’s progressing cosmopolitism and cultural empathy, influenced by the black legend of his grandfather and his involvement in the genocide of Native Americans.

Debby Applegate and John Matteson, winners of the Pulitzer Prize in Biography in the consecutive years 2007 and 2008, both agree and disagree about the methods, aims, and ethical philosophy of biographical writing. Here, they converse about the negative stereotypes that biographers must overcome; the researching process; the moral nature of humanity; the relative value to the biographer of sympathy and cynicism; and much more.

In her multifaceted, polyphonic essay “The Gift of Biography,” Caroline Stoessinger offers her reader an intimate insight into the emotional substratum of the ineffable bond between the biographer and her subject. The rapport, whose complex texture involves compassion, respect, and attentiveness, unwittingly manifests itself to the reader as the sine qua non condition of an authentic dialogue soon after he or she accepts Stoessinger’s invitation to join her in retracing the history of her friendship with Alice Herz-Sommer, the heroine of her internationally acclaimed book A Century of Wisdom. In the process of the shared recollection, the emotional horizons of the autobiographer and the reader fuse, allowing the latter to sense that the (auto)biography to which she or he has been made privy, has been gifted to them by the author, who has, imperceptibly, become a dear friend. Two selves sharing their inner lives – Herz-Sommer and Stoessinger, Stoessinger and the reader – share the space of authenticity, in which the hope that reverberates through the genius of Beethoven pierces the darkest of nights.

Two life writers in the same family--one neurotypical, one autistic—converse about the mountain of material they’ve produced: poems, memoir, essays, scholarship, and documentary film. Preferring to conceive of their work as interdependent and enmeshed, not bound by the strictures of identity politics and thus separate or conflicting, they advance a neurocosmopolitan and rhizomatous understanding of the self in words.  David James “DJ” Savarese is an artful activist, writer, teacher, and Co-Chair of The Alliance for Citizen-Directed Supports. An OSF Human Rights Initiative Youth Fellow (2017-19) and co-producer, narrator, and star of the Peabody award-winning documentary Deej: Inclusion Shouldn’t Be a Lottery, he publishes poems, creative nonfiction, and scholarly essays. Ralph James Savarese has authored five books and co-edited three collections, including the first on neurodiversity. He has received awards from the Herman Melville Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation, which funded a neurohumanities fellowship at Duke University’s Institute for Brain Sciences. He teaches at Grinnell College.  

In this article, I try to reconstruct the “representable self-image” of musician, writer and stage artist Nick Cave. I focus on his photographic portraits, the most emblematic and frequently reproduced, that create an iconosphere of rock and popular culture at the edge of the 20th and 21st centuries – taken by a Dutch photographer Anton Corbijn. However, I take under consideration not only photographic representations of Cave but also his latest output: music albums and the autobiographical movies 20 000 Days on Earth and One More Time with Feeling, as well as his poetry book called Sick Bag Song or his blog The Red Hand Files. All these hypertexts have been directed to give the audience a sense of participation in a metamorphosis, as they accompany the artist backstage, on tour, and in his hotel room. They show us how the “private” and “biological” body of the artist transfers into the “public” body, how it is monumentalized on stage and with a camera and – finally – how it becomes a “sign,” “trademark,” and “product.” Sometimes, this dialectic intimacy makes an impression of an exhibitionist-voyeuristic pact between the artist and his public. However, Cave runs this identity game very consciously and with self-irony. By crossing the borders between his mythologized stage effigie and his biography, Cave seems to adapt a Warhol-like politics of “giving good face” into the synoptical culture industry and fame culture of the 21st century.

Monodramas inspired by the lives of famous persons constitute a large group of contemporary Polish biographical plays. It is a sign of interest in clear-cut and referential characters – in contrast to the end-of-the-20th-century stage creation, marked by a profusion of characters with an unformed or broken personality. This article analyzes monodramas-testimonies and monodramas-reconstructions. In the first case, the character acts as a medium of absent reality, giving testimony by means of monologue about oneself and the outside world (it is an example of dialogical identity). The second type of monodrama is dominated by an auto-thematic approach, leading to the creation of meta-biographical plays (a performative identity establishing itself in the acts of creation of one’s own “I” is shown).

The article analyzes a series of Adam Zagajewski’s self-portraits against the backdrop of his essays as well as a variety of contemporary theories, especially Paul de Man’s deconstruction and Michel Foucault’s spirituality philosophy. According to this analysis, Zagajewski’s self-portraits are approaching the kind of spiritual exercises described by Pierre Hadot: Zagajewski uses them to try to rebuild his personality, having designed its richer and more mature version, partly following the example of Zagajewski’s masters, such as Józef Czapski. Understood in this way, Zagajewski’s works contain a surprisingly wealthy theoretical substance, heretofore unrecognized by commentators.

The article presents an interpretation of a postmodern epistolary novel – Encyclopaedierotic, focused on biofictional and autofictional writing strategies, It also recreates Ewa Kuryluk’s criticism of A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments by Roland Barthes. It introduces the connections between the veritable and fictitious biography of the semiologist and uncovers the meaning of the most significant “biographical transpositions.” It reveals the relationship between Kuryluk’s literary doppelgänger and herself: they are not completely identical. The nature of this relation is metonymical: the activities of literary Ewa are the traces of writer’s actions, a fact that raises issues of creative impossibility and calls into question the choice of making Barthes the main protagonist of Encyclopaedierotic.

This paper offers a new perspective on the life narratives produced by second-generation Holocaust survivors – specifically, it proposes to consider the genre of biography to be a distinctive mode of second-generation autobiography. In its detailed analysis of Vera Gran. The Accused (2010; English translation 2013), a story of the Jewish-Polish star chanteuse and Holocaust survivor Vera Gran, the essay argues that the survivor’s biography becomes Tuszyńska’s laboratory of the self: an opportunity for the member of the postmemory generation to understand her very own experience. The paper also demonstrates how auto/biography – this essentially heterogenic life narrative – may successfully address some of the key issues for both Holocaust and life-writing studies: self-/other-identification, appropriateness, victimisation, authenticity, truthfulness, and gender-related constructs.

he aim of this paper is to describe new, non-anthropocentric forms of non-fictional nature writing that can also be interpreted as life-nature (autoBIOgraphical) writing. The author discusses the works of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (anthropologist), Urszula Zajączkowska (biologist), Helen Macdonald (historian of science) and Jolanta Brach-Czaina (philosopher) in order to show their biopoetical writing strategies: immersion, rhizomatic, assemblage, and tentacularity. In her analysis, the author defines the strategies by using the concepts of Passage – understood in broader terms rather than as a trope of urban writing and reading – and flaneurie, which can be a non-urban experience, that represents the opposite of laboratory. This paper will also discuss the possibilities and the limits of non-anthropocentrism in literature.

The purpose of the considerations presented in this article is to analyze the status of philosophy in terms of its problem-solving potential, or, more simply, to trace the possible topographies of a philosophical path. The point of departure, but also the central subject of my research, is a passage from Plato’s The Symposium (201d–204c), containing an emblematic, though ambiguous, description of a philosophical journey. The key problems that this description poses, particularly in the area of its metaphilosophical consequences, certainly deserve a more profound reflection. Therefore, in the subsequent sections of the article, I present – and critically discuss – some of the most significant interpretations of Plato’s passage, emphasizing their (meta) philosophical implications. The latter, in turn, are organized according to the categories of the modes of philosophy, as proposed by Sextus Empiricus (Pyr., I, 1–4). On the basis of the proposed reflection upon the topography of the philosophical path and upon the character of the generally accepted model of knowledge, I endeavor to provide an explanation that, while avoiding the reefs of dogmatic consequences of thinking about philosophy, would account for – and acknowledge – the uncertainty inscribed in philosophy, both with respect to particular resolutions and with respect to the possibility of its own self-fulfillment. For this purpose, other narratives of paths, journeying, and pursuits – metaphorically unlike those offered by Plato, prove useful.

The article is an attempt to reflect on the phenomenon of non-human photography. The starting point of the text is noticing that because of the automatization of the photographing process, the photography created by humans is merely one of the fields of contemporary photography. The article is an analysis of Jon Rafman’s and Michael Wolf’s artistic projects in which they utilize images created by automatic Google Street View cameras. Artists expose cracks, gaps and errors of this system, bringing their projects close to the field of glitch art. The vital aspects of the analysis are its reflection on the notion of non-human gaze, its questioning of the truthfulness of the photography, and its examination of how the Google Street View interface is constructed.

The aim of the article is to investigate selected instances of the doppelgänger literary motif and to present how that centuries-old figure actualizes itself in the literature of the second half of the 20th century. The text explores the following questions: how is the relationship between these characters and traditional doppelgängers used to show the subject’s disintegration and sense of danger? Is the change that occurred within the doppelgänger figure only a superficial modernization of an obsolete trope or rather a profound evolution of the meaning it conveys? My research focuses on three Polish science-fiction narratives, written in different times and within different paradigms: “Holoman” by Janusz Szablicki, “Skasować drugie ja” by Adam Hollanek and “#Eudajmonia” by Magdalena Kucenty.

Nycz outlines the main trends of the New Humanities in the world - digital humanities, engaged humanities, cognitive humanities, posthumanism, art-based research, as well as the main debates and misunderstandings that have emerged over the last decade in the Polish context. An example of the evolution of ways of thinking and conducting research are the cultural-literary studies, CLS. This acronym stands for a variety of terms ranging from cultural literary theory to cultural-textual literacy.

Summaries of feature texts of the present issue in the Polish language.

Information for future Contributors -- thematic areas, text formatting, and stylesheet.

The colophon of the issue.