Ruch Literacki

This article is built on the premise that the topos has become a potent unit of cultural memory, an image that stores a wealth of often vague, buried or forgotten ideas. Its contents, like those of literature, tend to become extraordinarily condensed and confl ated; in consequence, some topoi (in particular the Holocaust topos) defy conventional tools of understanding and analysis. A solution to this problem can be found in an approach which broadens the scope of the sources of the Holocaust to include pop culture; gives up the rigid classifi cation of topoi, based on ‘hard’, documentary evidence; and, draws on a conceptual frame that connects the topos with the mechanisms of remembrance. A practical application of this approach is offered here in a series of readings of selected passages from Marcin Pilis’s novel The Meadow of the Dead (Łąka umarłych), Zygmunt Miłoszewski’s crime story A Grain of Truth (Ziarno prawdy), Marcin Wolski’s alternate history novel Wallenrod, Justyna Wydra’s war romance The SS-man and a Jewess (Esesman i Żydówka), Krzysztof Zajas’s thriller Oszpicyn [local Yiddish: Auschwitz] as well as some poems by Jacek Podsiadło from his volume The Breguet Overcoil (Włos Bregueta).

This article deals with recent Polish herstory narrations, i.e. works of fiction that, while relying on distinctly literary techniques and devices, foreground the feminine experience of history, and moreover, may be associated with the so-called Herstory Turn in Polish humanities and cultural studies. This category of fictions includes also novels in which the herstory narration belongs to a female subject created by a male author, notably Jacek Dehnel’s Abbess Macryna (Matka Makryna), Ignacy Karpowicz’s Little Sonya (Sońka) and Jarosław Kamiński’s Just Lola (Tylko Lola). These three novels are analyzed with the aim of showing how their narrative strategy foregrounds the women narrators/main characters (acting as history’s true subjects), identifying the marks of authorial imitation of the feminine discourse, and, finally, asking the question about man’s status in an ostensibly feminine text. It seems that one way of answering it would be to point to the male author’s validating the feminine experience of history and ensuring that it can be heard.

This article takes a look at Ryszard Nycz’s new, groundbreaking study of cultural theory, pointedly titled Culture as Verb. It focuses on the author’s two major claims which seem to provide a foundation for the whole project. One is a vigorous defence of the humanities, the other is the proposition that culture may be best understood as a verb. The latter provokes a number of questions, especially about the role of invention, a dominant factor in any action-oriented model of culture. For example, would invention control and drive the mechanism of semantic ordering and appropriation of the things that used to be nameless, ignored, or suppressed? Is that domination culturally determined, or merely conditioned? Is it a source of suffering? It would also be interesting to find out more about the Nycz’s idea of transition from passive participation to the culture of active participation. The question is: Are we doomed to take part? As an aside, the author of this essay draws our attention to the darker side of being permanently involved in other people lives, the FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) anxiety, and a new narcissism.

This article asks the question to what extent Ryszard Nycz’s ambitious project of cultural practice outlined in his book Culture as Verb succeeds in opening up ‘a new form of knowledge’ and thus equipping the humanities with a fresh validity. Nycz takes up the poststructuralist concept of the humanities as a site of alternative or subversive knowledge, founded on the principles of interpretation and textual dispersion, and refocuses it on involvement (participation) and binary oppositions (borders), i.e. human vs. nonhuman, or nature vs. culture as a construct. The article, rather than addressing the issues of involvement and borders (liminality), concentrates instead on the contradictions that Nycz’ s theory gives rise to when applied to history, time and the emergence of subjectivity (identity). There is nothing objectionable about the proposition that temporal change is at the very core of culture, yet its locus must be sought not in the proclamations of individual agents, but in the conceptual ruptures that expose and reveal the boundaries of (collective) consciousness and unconsciousness, i.e. the operation of contingency.

In a follow-up to Ryszard Nycz’s work Culture as Verb this article outlines a new way of bringing forward his great project. The challenge it has to face is the cognitive dilemma that lurks at the intersection of the humanities and the sciences, or, in other words, the dissonance between the traditional paradigm of accumulating and developing the store of cultural knowledge and cognitive procedures that underpin new, experimental and inductive knowledge with a potential to effect qualitative change. The article contends that Nycz’s study allows us to bypass that dilemma. The ‘Third Way’, as it is called here, would open up new forms of innovation, i.e. not just knowledge whose value is determined by its utility for the systems of late capitalism, but a mode of concrete practice of rediscovering the outer world for the humanities. In the process of capturing and transforming of that world, the metaphors of embodied labour and of knowledge production (conceptualized as the verb) function as extraordinarily important tools of the humanities reinvented as a practical, embodied theory.

This contribution to the critical discussion of Ryszard Nycz’s Culture as Verb draws on his use of the parts-of-speech model to submit another formula of conceptualizing culture, based on the adverb, and complementary to the already existing approaches. They can be divided into three classes: those that treat culture as adjective (i.e. all epiphenomenal interpretations which view culture as a set of attributes), those that treat it as noun (i.e. an object, a separate academic discipline), and those that focus on action and the processual nature of culture (hence culture as verb), and even – in association with pragmatist and performative theories of language and the more recent ‘Activist Turn’ in the social sciences – have come to regard culture as culture-in-the-making, constituted and sustained by action (activities, performances). Most important for the adverbial approach are the modalities of culture, manifested in a variety of life styles. The study of culture as adverb (‘how’) can be pursued independently of the trench wars of cultural determinists and functionalists. Responding directly to Culture as Verb, qualifi ed as, chiefl y, an epistemological study, the article calls for a closer examination of the ontological implications of Nycz’s project of reinventing the humanities.

The first part of this article brings the author’s reply to the participants of the panel discussion of his book Culture as Verb (Anna Łebkowska, Jakub Momro, Tomasz Rakowski and Dorota Wolska). In the second part he outlines his premises and explains the analytical vocabulary that has enabled him to move from an active to a passive ‘verbal’ understanding of culture. He also draws a broad outline of prospective new research that would complement his project. Central to it is the exploration of what he believes is the dominant contemporary cultural experience, which is based on active participation. To characterize its most important features and forms we should make use of the following, newly defi ned analytical concepts – passivity, the present moment, immersion, and testimonial authority.

Little is known about the genealogy and the biography of Eleonora Ziemięcka née Gagatkiewicz. Poland’s first female philosopher (1819–1869). This article, the fruit of extensive archival research, now supplies the missing data. It not only fi xes her birth date – hitherto unknown – but also gives us an insight into the circumstances and reasons of her being brought up away from her parents. It has also been possible to collect a good deal of information about her relations, especially the Gagatkiewicz family (she was the granddaughter of Walenty Gagatkiewicz, the most distinguished physician of late 18th century Warsaw), and the family connections and the profi le of her husband, the portrait painter Antoni Ziemięcki.