Masthead and table of contents of Er(r)go. Theory - Literature - Culture Nr. 46 (1/2023).

The article (research essay) approaches the Silesian version of the wound. The thing about Jorg is rooted in the idea of Silesian at home and Silesian varieties of anxiety, striving, and sublime looking into the infinite. The house is revealed as a significant cultural and metaphysical structure in which the wounded person trains themselves, returns home, and works through the fall. The accompanying figure of Ȭma hides the
knowledge about the gravity of what is absolute, what is in the distance, which should not appropriate life and rule over man. There is something terrifyingly symbolic in Jorg’s fate when he “loses” himself with music, along with Silesia and all that is human. Throwing oneself into the embrace of art and the world, the desire to embrace “everything,” to follow that which hurts, leads to difficulties in reconciling passion and crazy talent with the restraint and precision of the home, but also with keeping a man alive. The bill paid by a man is overwhelming.

By discussing social and technological developments in the system of biomedicine, the article aims to postulate an identity pattern in which human embodiment is inscribed in the context of advanced biotechnologies, especially genetics and genomics. The concept of post-patienthood refers to individual identity as a construct that relates the person’s present medical condition to a range of possible future scenarios, each formulated on the basis of genetic susceptibility to a particular disease. The post-patient, therefore, is neither healthy nor ill, and the present medical condition could be irrelevant to their sense of embodiment.

Taking a cue from the anthropause (Rutz et al., 2020), which accompanied the current pandemic of COVID-19, the article posits a new approach to an epidemic as a more-than-human performance. The performance is an action resulting from an entanglement of human and more-than-human agencies, producing effects across
socio-political, economic, and cultural contexts. The approach is an alternative to the dominant epidemic narratives, which view epidemics as phenomena of human public health, neglecting more-than-human agencies in their emergence and prevention. While analyzing chosen (re)presentations of an epidemic in popular culture, the article focuses on three aspects of an epidemic as a more-than-human performance. It scrutinizes the new model of sociality it posits, problematizes hitherto accepted ways of thinking about
human and nonhuman bodies, and projects forms of more-than-human cooperation to manage epidemics.

The article analyses two cases dealing with the issue of the body, its autonomy and fragility. The first case concerns the decision made by Bettina Goring - whose grandfather was Hermann Goring's brother. The woman decided to undergo tubal ligation so that her family's lineage would die out. The second, better-known case is the story of violence in Abu Ghraib prison in 2003, where American soldiers tortured Iraqi prisoners and captured everything in photographs. Both events explain the importance of the potentiality in the body and its economy and prove that the limits of bodily plasticity - both physical and semantic - are shifted further than commonly believed.

Susan Sontag opens her analysis of disease metaphors with the metaphor of health and disease as dual citizenship in bordering states. Games offer us a pass to reproductions and paraphrases of reality, so we also see here the borderline experience of good health/illness. However, it is worth asking whether in interactive entertainment one can find examples of representations of diseases that do not function as metaphors. Consequently, the aim of this essay is to analyze the metaphors put into practice – virtual life, but perhaps that is why they allow more than the observation of a dangerous pathogen. The main thesis of this essay is the position that games through the basic aspect of the medium – interactivity, often go beyond the “sentimental content” of the representation of the disease. Or at least the process of “sentimentalization” is more complex and is a product of many of the processes that make up the interactive entertainment experience.

The end of the nineteenth century was marked by a strangely affirming attitude to disabilities, diseases, and bodily deformities. From the Romantics, the artists of the Young Poland movement inherited a fascination with tuberculosis amounting to the mythologization of the sick; tuberculosis, or the “white plague,” was one of the favourite themes of the modernist studies of human disability and mortality. The turn of the century was also a time of extensive research into mental diseases. The naturalists, for that matter, equipped the great prose writers of the Belle Epoque with the medical conceptual apparatus and developed a sophisticated language of “clinical literature.” This article, focusing on several literary works representative of the Young Poland movement, strives to explain how, at the turn of the century, the experience of illness influenced
the texts of culture and, vice versa, how literature shaped the understanding of illness.

The subject of the article is the wounded body of heroines of young adult fantasy, understood as a socio-cultural construction and an element of female identity. By referring to the key assumptions of corporeal feminism (represented, for example, by Elizabeth Grosz, Ewa Hyży, and Monika Świerkosz), I analyze three novel series: The Mirror Visitor by Christelle Dabos, Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo, and The Jewel by Amy Ewing. I examine how the heroines’ bodies determine their place in the social hierarchy, how
the heroines experience the world through their bodies, and whether they own their bodies in a cultural, social, and political sense. I point to the importance of tormenting the protagonists’ bodies as an obligatory way to female emancipation.

The purpose of this article is to trace the behaviour of a traumatic affect based on the reading of Yusef Komunyakaa’s “Facing It,” a poetic ekphrasis of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Tracing the manners in which war trauma is worked through and acted out by the speaker, this paper discusses how trauma eludes both compensating processes. At the same time, the nonhuman or inhuman features of trauma are analysed
alongside the nonhuman agency of the memorial. The intersection of both nonhuman modes of being makes it possible to align the trauma discourses with materialist criticism. In addition, the traumatic experience is discussed through its tactile connotations following Komunyakaa’s poem and Maya Lin’s commentaries to her monument. Touch turns out to be a potent category capable of capturing the dynamics of a traumatic affect and a promising trope on which new ethical modes of being together in trauma might
be founded. Hence, the aim of this article is fourfold; it attempts to: (1) analyse how Komunyakaa’s poem, informed by the selected developments in materialist criticism and trauma studies, might illustrate and expand the affect of trauma; (2) deepen our understanding of the intersections of the material and the traumatic; (3) investigate how the speculative reorganisation of human and nonhuman boundaries, inspired by “Facing It,” might help in assessing trauma, which necessarily resides at the edges of subjectivity;
and (4) propose how the figure of trauma based on vulnerable and transformative limits might revise our understanding of community and formulate an ethical obligation for the traumatic times we live in.

James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), a documentary account of three cotton tenant families in Depression Alabama, centres on the image of the wound in its representations of tenant poverty. But Agee also transposes this image into more biological terms so that the tenants are seen as damaged cells or embryos. This transposition can be framed as a 1930s eugenic concern with pathological bodies. But this article argues, through a comparison to Georges Canguilhem's "The Normal and the Pathological" (1943), that Agee redefines pathology to mean the intrinsic tendency to error (or aleatory possibility) of the organism. This allows him to propose a leftist counter-discourse of resistance that is different from the finalistic Marxist or New Deal solutions to poverty in the 1930s. 

A phenomenon known well before the onset of modern society, registered as a medical term not until the second half of the 19th century, when physiologists and psychologists inquired into physical and mental exhaustion resulting from excessive work as well as that which had no work-related etiology. Such condition of the severe mental fatigue which entailed deficiency of nerve-force was defined by American neurologist
George M. Beard as neurasthenia. Taking into account scientific studies of enervation, the article examines some late 19th-century literary treatments of exhaustion in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s Against Nature and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White to present them as peculiar, decontextualized cases of exhaustion for exhaustion’s sake.

The article is an attempt at reading the poetry of Teresa Ferenc through the prism of feminist politics of mourning. Using Hélène Cixous’s neologism “stigmatext,” I argue that the figure of an “open wound” constitutes Ferenc’s poetic imagination. This figure refers not only to the tragic event of pacification of Sochy – Ferenc’s family village – but also to the specifically understood relation with mother as is conceived in our culture.
Motherhood functions here as a synecdoche of stigmatized otherness. From this point of view, poetry of open wounds emerges as an integral element of Ferenc’s ethical program, which is opposed to the phallogocentric logic of war, death, and destruction.

This article explores Małgorzata Lebda’s poetry (Sprawy ziemi, Mer de Glace) with a focus on representations of the body and physicality. The experience of illness, death, and woundedness, all stigmatized in the poems, becomes a starting point for analysis and interpretation. The paper also addresses three major aspects of these poems: the child’s initiation into the world through acquiring the wound, the carnal human-animal communion, and grief after the death of one’s mother. Sensitivity to woundedness becomes the foundation of care in Lebda’s poetry.

In the 20th century, tuberculosis was already perceived as a democratic disease. An overview of tuberculosis became different and less serious. Seven-volumed press ephemerid from the interwar period, that is, Prątka Jednodniówka (Bystra Śląska) is one of the examples. This journal is gelotherapeutic. Introducing satirical, journalistic, literary and graphic genres, it used some sophisticated rhetorical and metaphorical devices to
familiarize tuberculosis and made an attempt of a laughter therapy. A sense of community associated with the undertaking, placing the subject in the health resort reality and undertaking medical issues in a humorous manner: the aim of all these factors was to show the life in the sanatorium as well as tuberculosis itself in the crooked mirror of a satire.

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

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The colophon of the E(r)rgo. Theory - Literature - Culture issue No. 46 (1/2023).