Vol. 12 No. 2 (2018): Materiality and Modernity

The main section of this issue is devoted to studies of the relation between philosophical, literary and artistic facets of modernity, as well as to the materiality and medium of language. Grzegorz Marcinkowski writes about the Benjamin-type experience of shock; Kacper Bartczak discusses modern American poetry from the perspective of the materiality of language; Anna Kałuża examines contemporary art in the process of discovering the materiality of its medium; Jakub Kornhauser traces the evolution of the object as the material vehicle of creative expression; Katarzyna Trzeciak depicts the transformations of materialities in Kraków’s Nowa Huta; Katarzyna Szopa makes a revision of Anna Świrszczyńska’s views on feminism; Dezydery Barłowski adopts a perspective informed by gender to examine the views of William Burroughs. In the “Varia” section, the reader will find articles addressing, among other topics: Imaginative and artistic affinities between Bruno Schulz and Tomasz Różycki; Witold Gombrowicz’s specific aestheticism; the debate over the shape of Polish literary studies as initiated by the publication of Feliks Bentkowski’s Historia literatury polskiej (A History of Polish Literature, 1914). This issue also contains the “Discussions and polemics”, “Chronicles”, and “Archives” sections (the latter featuring “Funeral Speech for Zofia of the Potockis” in Agnieszka Łatajska’s edition).