About the Journal
About the Journal
The Silesian Journal of Polish Studies is a scholarly periodical devoted to literary and historical-literary studies and to criticism – literary criticism in particular. We treat history, theory and criticism in the field of literary studies as intimately connected to theories of culture and the arts.
The journal is published at The University of Silesia. Set up in 2011 as the initiative of staff of the Ireneusz Opacki Institute of Polish Literary Studies, it initially focused mostly on research into literary practice. With time, the scope of articles accepted for publication was broadened and came to encompass studies of cultural and artistic practice. Still, literature and literary studies have remained the main areas of interest.
Semi-annual journal “Śląskie Studia Polonistyczne” is an open access journal. Submissions are accepted in Polish, and English languages.
Aims and Scopes
The basic profile of the journal is associated with postmodern consciousness and the post-traditional order of things as its most essential component. The aim of the journal is to create a space for debate which will enable reflection about the future of literature and of literary studies as they function in post-media and post literary conditions. Another important element of the context for the literary and artistic practices examined in the journal is the transformation of earlier artistic systems and hierarchies, which has necessitated a redefinition of what we regard as literary. Hence the emerging general perspective constituting the ideological message of the journal is underpinned by the belief in the aesthetic and political alliance between the practice of research, artistic activity, and literary-critical reflection.
So far, the following problems have been subjects of analysis within the journal’s publications: critical and literary debates as seen within the context of historical perspective, at times centuries-long; father figures in literature and the arts; the economics of literature; metaliterary reflections linked to the desire to write; psychoanalysis and social change; literature of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania; game studies; the other life of history in literature; materiality and modernity; the park as metaphor and space; masculinity and post-masculinity.
One reading of the title of the journal suggests that the content within offers a Silesian perspective on Polish literature and arts. Yet, our aim is distinct from this; the “Silesianness” in the journal is to be construed as the workings of minority components of dominant narratives in a more general sense. The journal’s ambition is to look at the concerns of literary studies – including those which arise at borderlines with other disciplines – from a “minor” or in other words critically oblique perspective.
Sections
Two sections make up the main part of each issue of The Silesian Journal of Polish Studies: 1. “Essays and Articles”, a thematically consistent corpus of texts constituting an issue’s basic component, and 2. “Presentations” of authors and poets, including excerpts of their literary compositions. Articles concentrate on particular research problems and on literary and cultural phenomena; some discuss new research methodologies that are seen as essential from the perspective of the current knowledge about language, the media, representation and the relational situation of individual fields of art in the world of post-literacy, focusing on literary arts in particular. In principle, any element of the socio-cultural universe can be the subject of an analysis conducted from a/this new research perspective, which takes into account the changed hierarchy of the arts and literature. The “Presentations” section – which usually contains a short interview with a contemporary writer and brief commentaries on his or her artistic output (typically represented by a sample of fiction or poetry as selected by the author) – is an expression of the editors’ belief in the necessity to combine conceptual/theoretical research with critical and artistic practice. Moreover, each issue (up until the year 2019) contained a section called “Discussions and Polemics,” in which the latest literary publications, scholarly and essayistic, were critically examined. Two thematic modules, “Archives” and “Chronicles,” constituted an integral – if optional – part of the journal; they recorded significant past phenomena and events, fixed on the timeline of Polish studies in Poland. Issues of our particular interest include minority, postcolonial, biopolitical, gender discourses and the interface between literacy and visuality.
The journal’s website: https://www.slaskiestudiapolonistyczne.us.edu.pl
