Books in the Cross-Roads series

This book reconstructs fundamental assumptions on weak thought, a crucial tendency in contemporary hermeneutics. Some motifs of weak thought serve to reinterpret the concept of mimesis and that of the textual subject as a trace. The book also describes tendencies in modern literature in which weak being is expressed by the motif of the trace.

The book provides a comprehensive summary of the existing approaches to the prose poem and offers an original conception of it, remaining close to the poetic texts by following the intricate line of development of the prose poem, in Modern Polish and European literary history and literary genre theory.

This book focuses on the collaboration of Derrida, Lyotard, Hillis Miller, and others at the Critical Theory Institute at UC Irvine and on critical theory as a methodology for the analysis of contemporary American visual art of Nauman, Kosuth, Burden, Christo, Johns, Rauschenberg, and others. It also includes a Prologue by Georges van Den Abbeele.

The book is a monograph on Andrzej Bobkowski's writings, a Polish author, diarist, epistolograph, and essayist, most famous for his diary Wartime Notebooks: France 1940-1944. The monograph offers an insightful reading of the existential functions of writing, autobiographic strategies, and the axiological dimension of Bobkowski's works.

The book reconstructs a poetic vision of the world after the Fall and describes Czeslaw Milosz's model of modernism, shaped by his intellectual and existential division between pessimism and ecstasy, yearning for contact with the meaning of reality, and faith in the power of poetic imagination.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the entirety of Wislawa Szymborska's poetic oeuvre. The author reveals that - without reflecting on her early entanglement in socialist realism - Szymborska's mature anti-dogmatic attitude will remain unclear. The book shows how Szymborska's rhetoric and stylistics affect her messages.

This book presents the rhetorical means of creating discourses about a writer. It shows the place of literature in culture and the workings of cultural memory. It offers a completely innovative approach and method. The author provides an exemplary study of the famous Polish modernist poet and writer Miron Bialoszewski.

The book presents a universal theory of autobiography which has a "triangular" model. Three stances: witness, confession and challenge to the reader, are always present, though usually one is dominant. Polish autobiographical writing is seen in relation to European autobiographies and against the background of history.

The book focuses on cultural memory preserved in the Polish Romantic literature, and still present in Polish public life. It depicts the Romantic project of transforming history into memory in the poetic texts of Mickiewicz, Slowacki and Norwid (as well as Byron and other European Romantics).

The book considers the poetry of Czeslaw Milosz in the light of world literature and comparative literary studies. It employs critical debates about his reception in American literature, English literature, and Polish literature. It elaborates his poetics of perspectivism in the context of authorial persona and Eliot, Whitman, Blake, and Nietzsche.

Referring to the modern theory of text, the book treats the exchange taking place in literary texts between the body and the sign. The basic concept of this exchange is the rhythm. The example of selected Polish texts presents various mechanisms that shape the somatic sphere of writing and reading.

This book presents a collection of essays discussing the history of the five myths of Dionysus, Narcissus, Prometheus, Marcolf, and Labyrinth in twentieth-century literature. The author traces their transformations against the wider backdrop of Polish and European literature.

This book refers the voice of Polish anthropology in the Western debate on the Clifford Geertz's interpretive anthropology. This book will show how principle categories such as text, interpretation, thick description have been absorbed by anthropological discourse, which influence theories (epistemology) and research methods in anthropology.

The questions the writer Samuel Beckett posed in his dramas, his prose and his poetry are the central questions asked by the most outstanding thinkers of modernity. This study is not only a precise literary analysis, but it also traces transformations in terms of subjectivity and tries to conceptualize them.

The book shows the heterogeneity of Polish Romanticism, which is often unfairly narrowed in its reception abroad to the issue of nationality. The authors focus on the history of Poland and Russia in the nineteenth century, but also address aesthetic problems concerning the ideas of truth and beauty, irony and mysticism, and the role of tradition.

This award-winning book deals with the ethical aspect of emotions in human decision making in literature. The broadest description of the process of 'emotional obsession' can be found in Euripides' tragedy of Phaedra, but the topos can be found in the tragedies of Roman philosopher Seneca and modern French poet Jean Racine, as well.

Gustaw Herling's A World Apart is one of the most important books about soviet camps and communist ideology in the Stalinist period, but it was relatively unknown till Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago in the 1970s. In this first monograph on Herling's fascinating life, Bolecki discusses hitherto unknown documents from the writer's archive.

The most comprehensive book in English on the Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz combines literary and historical approaches to his poems, essays, literary criticism and translations and to his poetic self-image. It offers an account of the Polish cultural milieu in the 20th century and interprets the fate of poetry under two totalitarian regimes.

This is a reader's book about Wislawa Szymborska's poetry. She holds the Nobel Prize in Literature of 1996. The Contents of the book are the Nobel Lecture held in Stockholm at the official ceremony by the poet in December 1996, a choice of Polish essays about Szmyborska's poetry and translations of her works into German, English, Spanish and French.

This book presents articles published in the journal Teksty Drugie as contributions to the debate on principles of literary studies. It represents the main tendencies of contemporary criticism and indicates its transition from text-oriented, purely scientific procedures to contextualized, interpretative approaches, the "poetics of experience".

The author asks questions like "Can a Jew be both a Jew and a Pole?", "Are we right to talk of 'worthy' and 'unworthy' death in the Holocaust?" and "What are the implications of Adam Mickiewicz's philo-Semitism?" and offers answers tracing the history of anti-Jewish stereotypes in early nineteenth-century Poland (and beyond).

The book gathers important contributions from Polish Translation Studies since 1930s, including conceptualisations, stylistics, poetics, history and anthropology of translation. They are grounded in Literary Studies, Cultural Studies and Linguistics and present Eastern European context for TS. It is the first presentation of the area in English.

The book describes the system of communist censorship in Poland in the years 1948-1958, as well as its effects on the development of literature. It is based on archival sources in the form of documents created by the Central Censorship Office. It is the first literary studies work which takes up the subject in such broad and systematic terms.

The book explores the creative potential of misunderstanding in cross-cultural communication. The concept is studied from the perspective of translation studies, literary and cultural history, sociology. Misunderstanding is viewed as an elementary and unavoidable component of any verbal and cultural communication and a factor in artistic creation.

The book presents the birth of the psychoanalytical movement on Polish lands in the years 1900-1918, on the broad background of the assimilation processes of Polish Jews. The author points out that Freud's theory played the role of "the promised land", as it was associated with the idea of the establishment of a more just social order.

The book is focused on the concrete literary representations of misunderstanding. Although most case studies refer to Polish culture, the results of the presented research are relevant to broader cultural issues. The contributors explore misunderstanding as a purposeful artistic strategy.

This book discusses the changes in contemporary culture at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries in Poland on the example of relationships between literature and the media. The author adopts an interdisciplinary approach combining literary and media studies with the perspectives of social communication, anthropology and sociology of culture.