Streszczenie

This new (twelfth) issue of Explorations brings you critical essays, reviews, poems and an interview. If you are interested in contemporary poetic scene, start with Jacek Gutorow's conversation with Paul Farley, one of the most interesting British poets of the last few decades. If you want more, have a look at Farley's three amazing new poems which follow the interview – they come from his new book When It Rained for a Million Years (to be published by Picador Macmillan in March 2025) and are here published for the first time. If you are rather into prose literature, you can go to the articles section: there are some thought-provoking insights into the classical novels of Jonathan Swift, William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez, as well as intriguing interpretations of works by Susan Sontag, Francine Prose and Susan Straight. And in the reviews section you can check our recommendations of recent critical books from Margaret Atwood, Justyna Fruzińska and Ewa Młynarczyk (a promising new Polish scholar who died in 2022).

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identity |performance |Susan Sontag |performative femininity |diary |life writing

Streszczenie

In 1990, Judith Butler’s work titled Gender Trouble introduced the definition of gender performativity into the critical discourse regarding gender identities. Butler’s definition, though initially pertaining to the social aspect of gender identity, delineates the performance of gender as an act of social self-expression. In the case of women, however, gender performativity has become a method of self-adjustment to patriarchal demands. Moreover, traces of performative femininity permeate the writing of female diarists who use their diaries not only as a site for self-creation, but also a tool for gaining social acceptance in a patriarchal environment through their performance of femininity. My analysis, focused on Susan Sontag’s As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Diaries 1964-1980, aims to reveal the influence of performative femininity onto her internal dialogue, and establish connection between both the causes and nature of her gender performance and her use of a diary as a site of performance.

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Jonathan Swift |Gulliver’s Travels |18th century England |political literature |palace on fire scene

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The palace on fire scene in the first part of Gulliver’s Travels, when the protagonist extinguishes the flames by urinating on them, has become the symbol of Swift’s personal criticism of authority and the institution of monarchy. For obvious reasons, in children’s version of the novel, the scene is remade and reinterpreted in a multitude of manners to remove the embarrassing physiological element that both young readers and their parents might find outrageous or simply offensive. The aim of the present article is to discuss the critical meaning of the scene in relation to Jonathan Swift’s political views and to demonstrate the great miscellany of variants of the scene in selected abridged versions of Gulliver’s Travels in Polish and English.

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ethnicity |assimilation |migration narrative |novel of manners |globalization

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The paper discusses the changing role of ethnicity in immigrant narratives with the example of Francine Prose's novel My New American Life (2011). It is a multidimensional work of fiction which presents ethnicity as a cultural and social asset. The novel brings into play and revisits a tradition of the novel of manners. It uses American cultural and social stereotypes to tailor the main character’s new identity of existential in-betweenness. and to represent the American realities of the Bush-Cheney era through the filter of the protagonist’s perspective as a semi-legal alien of a suspicious ethnic background. The paper problematizes the geopolitical challenges of immigration that the novel’s characters deal with in post-9/11 America. The article argues that in the novel, immigration is presented as a process with a distinct social dimension, prioritizing safety and welfare over the values of democracy and personal freedom.

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Susan Straight |A Million Nightingales |African American family |posthumanism

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This study presents a new posthumanist reading of Susan Straight’s A Million Nightingales (2007), proposing a novel vision of familial relationships. The primary focus of my analysis is on the posthumanist representations of the African American family in A Million Nightingales, which suggest the blurring of existing boundaries and hierarchies through the underscoring of the importance of memory, body marks, and animated things. I draw inspiration from both Jane Bennett’s and Donna Haraway’s theories, assuming that a new reading of the novel should focus on the importance of embracing all the differences to create a more interconnected and harmonious existence for all beings.

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architecture |power |William Faulkner |Gabriel García Márquez |history

Streszczenie

This paper analyzes the filiations and affiliations of biography, architecture, writing, power, and history between William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez. The author argues that the structures of Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch are highly symbolic and charged with a rich palimpsest of personal, historical, and national meanings. The structures are seen as troubled as they evoke both a critique of patriarchal power and violence in history even while they simultaneously reflect both author’s anxieties about newfound fame and the power that comes with it.