My aim with this essay was to write about bordercrossing and border changing in Olga Tokarczuk’s literary work with the main focus on her novel Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead. While writing I came to the conclusion that there are very many different sorts of border changing in the novel, for example borders between countries, borders between fiction and reality, indistinct borders, borders between identities and borders in time and space. However, one distinct bordercrossing, that I had not anticipated, emerged very clearly: the border changing when it comes to genre. Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead characterizes as a detective story, but the more you read the novel, the more you realize, that other themes might be more important than the puzzle. This book holds above all eco fiction and posthumanism. By crossing different borders Olga Tokarczuk has transformed an illusory detective story to a nuanced novel about human life on various levels and in different spaces, about human view on animals and about hunters’ disrespect for animals.

The present thesis explores works of Pavel Růžek and Jerzy Pilch, its central focus being the analysis and interpretation of their approach towards one's own biography and one's identity as a writer. Although both authors come from the same generation, they address different literary traditions and construct different poetics. What they have in common, however, are literary motifs rooted in their biographies, such as alcoholism, the mythology of childhood, [the existence of] "fateful places," even particular types of women or other characters (including animals). Additionally, the thesis scrutinises the position of both writers in the consciousness of Polish and Czech readership along with their place on the two literary markets.

Thesis In the Light of Kabbalah: Jewish Mystique in Polish Literature in the Interwar Period deals with different models of reflection of Jewish religious and mystical tradition in the Polish interwar literature (on the example of three authors representing different ways of perceiving their own Jewish roots as well as the processing of themes based on the tradition of Jewish mysticism). Aleksander Wat, originally a futurist, was critical of the Jewish religious tradition - but still cannot his own "Jewishness" escape; prose writer Bruno Schulz offers an unique vision of cosmogony and eschatology reminiscent of - besides other things - selected concepts of Kabbalah; Bolesław Leśmianʼs relationship to this tradition is the looses, but on the other hand his method of working with motives which can interpreted in the context of the Jewish religious tradition is very original. Literary work of all three - as the heirs to the "people of the Book" - is marked by a specific relationship to language and the written word. In addition to this theme we deal with e.g. the Golem motive, the idea of the creation of the world or the idea of God. These analytical chapters are preceded by a theoretical and methodological introduction based on the traditions of literary hermeneutics, but also on selected concepts of...

The thesis is primarily focused on the person of the Polish Jesuit preacher Piotr Skarga and his most famous work Kazania Sejmowe, 1597. In the introduction of our thesis we deal with the area of The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the turn of 16th and 17th century. We put more detailed emphasis on political and cultural history and we describe life, activities and literary work of Piotr Skarga. In the core of our thesis we analyse the selected parts, elements and themes of the literary work Kazania Sejmowe. Subsequently we compare them with several other central european literary works. The aim of our thesis is to take a closer look at the personality and the literary work that have a firm place in Polish culture and to compere them with other central european literature. Keywords Piotr Skarga, Polish literature, Counter-Reformation, 16th century, jesuits, PolishLithuanian Commonwealth

Le parallèle entre Król-Duch de Juliusz Słowacki et Aurélia de Gérard de Nerval est une comparaison narratologique des deux œuvres (en dehors de l’étude d'influences réciproques, comme de l’étude de sources). Le rapprochement des deux auteurs (enrichi par l’apparition, en arrière-fond, de Novalis - toujours dans la perspective d'un parallèle) se construit autour du thème de l’écriture de la révélation onirique. Elle laisse apparaître une rupture fondamentale entre le contenu de la révélation – une existence continue du moi - et la forme discontinue et inachevée sous laquelle elle s’exprime. L’autobiographie onirique qui raconte l’expérience indicible d’une « seconde vie » infinie, entrevue en rêve, apparaît ainsi comme un seuil narratif qui s’interpose entre le fragment et la totalité. Dans les trois parties de l’étude comparée, consacrées respectivement aux modèles de composition, aux modalités de l’inachèvement et aux profils narratifs des deux textes, est posée la question de la limite entre les images mentales d’une extrême subjectivité et leur avatar textuel. Le rapport entre l’invisible et sa représentation y apparaît au travers du rapport entre le rêve du moi infini et le récit de ce rêve, qui se construit comme une perpétuelle réincarnation du « je » en tant que sujet. / « Dream is a second life », Gérard de Nerval writes. « I have never been able to cross through those gates of ivory or horn which separate us from the invisible world without a sense of dread ». He sees dream and real life as asunder though parallel compartments, while Juliusz Słowacki sees them a continuum, without precise boundary where one ends and the other begins. But they do agree on one point: poetry and dream are intimately united.Juliusz Słowacki’s Król-Duch and Nerval’s Aurélia have in common to be oneiric biographies, i.e. written from naked truth as revealed in dreams, where « life is free of space and time ». The outcome is well-nigh as disconnected and incoherent as dream itself. Words cannot represent adequately heavens opened. It is somewhat uncanny that, in both cases, the fragments of the « infeasible book » look like an initiation into sacred mysteries.

The aim of this dissertation is to study urban domesticity in Polish film and literature against the background of the political and social transformations that have taken place in recent decades. The study begins with the so-called belle époque of the Polish People’s Republic and the decade of Edward Gierek, continues through the political upheavals, the period of martial law, and the system transformation of 1989 and the two following decades, which have been marked by the introduction of democracy, global capitalism, consumerism etc. The primary sources consist of almost thirty literary and cinematic works from various genres covering a period of forty years – twenty before the system change, and twenty after. Their common denominator is their setting in the socialist housing projects (blokowisko).  The dissertation places itself in the field of geocriticism and literary/cinematic spatiality. The object of the study is the ̒social space’ (Henri Lefebvre) of the urban home, and the main analytical frames are spatial representations and narrative space, which are viewed as important in shaping both character and plot. The analysis also draws from cultural theory by Michel Foucault, Marc Augé, Mikhail Bakhtin, Mircea Eliade, and Loïc Wacquant. The dissertation detects a shift in the representations of the urban home that indicates that the home has become more private and secluded after 1989, also suggesting that a spatial and social marginalization of the socialist housing projects has occurred. These findings are interpreted as consistent with theories in human geography on changes in the perception and experience of space due to global paradigm shifts and changes in the production system.

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La présente thèse étudie le développement historico-esthétique du conte littéraire polonais au XXe siècle sur la base d’un corpus qui s’étend de la Jeune Pologne à 1989, en se limitant à la littérature pour adultes. Cette étude se combine avec une réflexion théorique sur la nature du conte en tant que forme littéraire et propose l’outil de la convention pour cerner sa dynamique et sa polymorphie. Dans le conte, nous distinguons quatre niveaux de convention :le monde représenté, les motifs, la narration et le style. Les modèles conventionnels de ces quatre catégories, exposés dans le premier chapitre, servent de repères pour évaluer l’apport des écrivains à la convention du conte dans les deuxième et troisième chapitres. Le deuxième chapitre met en évidence le dynamisme historique qui anime le conte au XXe siècle dans la littérature polonaise, tandis que la troisième partie dégage de façon transversale les principales tendances esthétiques dans l’écriture féerique. Ainsi, le fil de la convention permet de tracer un panorama historique ainsi que de dégager les tendances esthétiques majeures du conte dans la littérature polonaise du XXe siècle, se révélant par là un outil pertinent dans l’étude du conte littéraire. Notons enfin que cette étude du conte littéraire offre un nouveau regard sur quelques uns des écrivains majeurs de la littérature polonaise du XXe siècle :B. Lesmian, W. Gombrowicz, St. I. Witkiewicz, Br. Schulz, T. Konwicki, St. Lem, Sl. Mrozek, Cz. Milosz et bien d’autres. /<p><p>Based on a wide corpus of adult literature, the present doctoral thesis is devoted to the historical and esthetical development of Polish literary fairy tale in the twentieth century from the Young Poland to the year 1989. It proposes at the same time a theoretical reflection on the literary form of fairy tale. Accordingly the convention is used as the main tool to apprehend its dynamics and its polymorphism. In the fairy tale, four conventional levels can be distinguished: represented world, motives, narration and style. Presented in the first chapter, the conventional models of theses four categories are used as reference points to gauge writers’ contribution to the fairy-tale convention in the second and the third chapters. The second chapter highlights historical dynamism of the fairy tale in Polish literature of the twentieth century, while the third part draws transversally the main esthetical tendencies in fairy-tale writing. Therefore the convention allows to outline an historical panorama and to define the main esthetical tendencies in Polish literature of the twentieth century, which proves its relevance in the study of literary fairy tale. Moreover this study of literary fairy tale takes a fresh look at some of the most important Polish writers of the twentieth century: B. Lesmian, W. Gombrowicz, St. I. Witkiewicz, Br. Schulz, T. Konwicki, St. Lem, Sl. Mrożek, Cz. Milosz. <p> / Doctorat en Langues et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This dissertation examines Soviet and Polish science fiction from the 1960s to 1980s as a political genre that investigates power and society. The problem of alterity is central for this genre: it is ungovernable because it is incomprehensible. Science fiction of this kind explores the possibilities and impossibilities of living with the Other that can impact social organization dramatically and lethally while that Other cannot be impacted in return. Living peacefully with such alterity is the fundamental premise of pluralism as a principle of social organization, according to the conclusions of the study. The dissertation explores alterity in science fiction by Ivan Efremov (1908–1972), Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (1925–1991 and 1933–2012), Stanisław Lem (1921–2006), and Volodymyr Savchenko (1933–2005). My goal is to reveal in their works a transformative epistemological shift that had manifested itself through the tropes of alterity. Among these tropes the dissertation highlights aliens and alien civilizations, artificial intelligence, anisotropic universe, distant planets endowed with unique natural attributes, the more abstract unknown, and non-human elements running out-of-control within human species. I also examine specifically science-fictional notions such as the bull and progressor, which represent the intelligentsia’s relations with power and the masses. The analyzed literary worlds also represent their authors’ views of alternative societal organization, ruled by the powerful alterity such as a mega-computer or alien super-intelligence. Another important trope of alterity is based upon a simultaneous performance of contradictory competing logics that create an effect known as parallax: the reader may interpret the same characters and/or stories in multiple, mutually incompatible, ways. Beyond avoiding censorship, these tropes set the stage for the authors’ utopias, in which the Other appears as an impenetrable alterity that affects those who encounter it. For these writers, alterity serves as the tool for problematizing progress, as it was imagined after World War II by the majority of political elites under socialism and in the West. I suggest that their science fiction contributed, among many other factors, to the lexicon and the imaginary of a cohort of political dissidents and Communist Party functionaries alike who translated science-fictional themes into political science terms to shape Perestroika’s discourse. The dissertation, thus, establishes a historical connection between Soviet and Polish science fiction of the post-Stalin period and the ways in which democracy was discursively constructed in Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and other former socialist nations.