Piotr Sobolczyk

The paper discusses the idea of atopia instead of the utopia-dystopia dichotomy. Utopia-dystopia are based on the figure of inversion and the author convinces that subversion is the queer means for change if it leads to atopia, and atopia is unpredictable. The author studies several queer projects by Lee Edelman, Jose Esteban Munoz and Leo Bersani pointing to their atopian horizons.

The essay calls for filling a gap in the studies on Warsaw Uprising concerning the place of queer people. A recent play, Snakepit by Joanna Oparek is considered, and the " scandal " surrounding Elżbieta Janicka's academic work Festung Warschau is analysed, but the main source of understanding non-normative masculinities and sexualities is Miron Białoszewski's Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising. The author offers a " paranoid " reading of traces, suggestions, allusions, and " illogical " fragments to build a working metaphor of queer acquaintances as an alternative " map " without the map. Finally he invokes the role of the picaresque narrative convention in representing such paranoid queer relationships. A queer history of the Warsaw Uprising is yet to be written. In her recent monograph Płeć powstania warszawskiego [Warsaw Uprising's Gender] (Grzebalska 2013), written from a feminist viewpoint, Weronika Grzebalska calls for the recognition of the role women played in the Uprising, and includes analysis of interviews with living female participants. Yet in terms of love or sexual relationships this analysis subscribes to a heteromatrix narrative: it suggests that all the relations women engaged in were heterosexual, and there is no mention of dissident sexualities among men which would oppose the dominant military model of masculinity. In a discussion on one chapter of the book in question, at the Gender Studies Department at the Polish Academy of Sciences in 2012, I asked the author this inconvenient question and she replied that the female survivors, her interviewees, never mentioned it, which shows this is a taboo. On the other hand, she did not ask them about it either. My critical arrow would not be able to fly had I not seen the Uprising through the (queer) lens of Miron Białoszewski. This poet and prosaist, together with one of the greatest Polish poets of the 20 th century, Anna

The text introduces the notion of "enigmatic signifier" (derived from Jean laplanche's theory) and employs it to the "thick" description of "sexual fingerptints" (Magnus Hirschfeld's idea). Four Polish "secret diaries" are used: Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz's, Miron Białoszewski's, Jerzy Andrzejewski's and Witold Gombrowicz's. The text distinguishes between "official diaries" and "secret diaries" which are the product of "paranoid culture" (Melanie Klein's "paranoid" and "depressive" positions are adapted). Reading sexuality as tracing the "enigmatic signifier" treats "sexuality"  (usually understood as genital actions or bodily stimulation) not as an isolated part of a (sexual) persona, but places it within the complex texture with other threads such as politics, taste, nation, etc. The signifier remains enigmatic because it is interwoven in this complex texture.

The text appeared in: Writing the Self. Essays on Autobiography and Autofiction, ed. K. W. Shands, G. Grillo Mikrut, D. R. Pattanaik, K. Ferreira-Meyers, Södertörn 2015, s. 329-344.

Open Access copy of the anthology can be found at:

http://sh.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A856577&dswid=-2008

An already classic study of queer topics in Miron Białoszewski. First print in 2006 in "Teksty Drugie", then reprinted as a longer version in 2007 in a book "Literackie reprezentacje doświadczenia", finally translated into English for the special edition of "Teksty Drugie" entitled "Texts and Body", a selection of best Polish gender and queer papers from the decade.

A complex review of Witold Gombrowicz's "Kronos", the secret diary, published shortly after its publication. Gombrowicz's psychological temper in it via the narrative analysis is revealed as the "anal eroticism" as represented by the collections of lovers on a long list, and of money earned. The idea of sublimation and desublimation is introduced: if "Kronos" is supposed to be a provocation as a very direct and "not elaborated" artistically nor intellectually text, then perhaps it is meant to exalt the more "elaborated" texts which entails, as Gombrowicz seems to be saying, "sublimation".

The paperostensibly refers to Harold Bloom’s categories
of the anxiety of influence. Bloom’s theory is treated
as an immanentist one, i.e. text/aesthetics/personality
-oriented, which is specific to the period in which
the theorywas developed. However, at least from the 80s
of the XXth century, there occurs a visible change towards
sociologization of all the human sciences. The paper appropriates
and resignificates Bloom’s categories and intermingles them
with the concepts of social psychology in order to enable
a description of the condition of writers in the current
social context.

The article presents the moment in the reception of the poetic work of Miron
Białoszewski when the critics tried to overwrite his poetry into an avant-garde paradigm.
The avant-garde in the beggining of the 1950s in Poland was, after the socrealism
period, understood almost exactly the way it was historically construed in the 1920s
and 1930s, and therefore only the fi rst book by Białoszewski could be seen in this view
as „avant-garde”. The avant-garde poet Julian Przyboś and the critic Artur Sandauer could
not understand Białoszewski’s movement toward a „new avant-garde” of the 1960s,
like the „linguistic poetry” and „writing-the-every-day”, and they called it „gibberish”, but
younger generations of critics managed to understand what was years later thoroughfully
described as the „linguistic poetry” and made Białoszewski a historical persona in Polish
literature.

The article is an attempt to reconsider the problem of the literary neologisms on the ground of
poetics treated here, according to the hermeneutics and neoidealistic approaches, as an expression
of the poet's way of thinking. So far the problem was dealed with linguistics methods and the
author prefers to reformulate it using the rethorics language. The material for this attempt is the
"linguistic poetry" of Miron Białoszewski (1922-1983) who often used neologisms in order to
express his individuality, to create literary concepts or to shorten his expression. The author
proposes the following subdivision of the neologisms: the paragramatic neologism, the contextual
neologism, the neoetymologic figure, the contaminatio neologism.

The article analyses the idea of the phenomenon of scientific reviews and the situation of the so called "cultural reviews". "Cultural reviews" combine current literary production and current literary criticism, while the so called "scientific reviews" publish only articles on non-current, historical or theoretical literary issues. In the Polish ministerial system only the latter reviews give the scholars "points" for their publications. However, Polish studies have developed Departments of Literary Criticism or Departments of 21st Century Literature and the best place to publish for such scholars are "cultural reviews," where they cannot get "points" which are crucial for their careers. The article offers an attempt to solve this problem on the institutional ground.

El texto propone un analisis del cuento de Terenci Moix escrito originalmente en catalan como "La caiguda de l'Imperi Sodomita" (1976). Mi interpretación demuestra una polemica con no tanto la escritura bibilica, como la interpretación cristiana que demonizó Sodoma y cambió el significado de la historia, refiriendolo hcia la "homosexualidad", en la cultura hebraica desconocida como un tipo de organización sexual. Moix via un movimiento trans-historico y "camp" convierte esa historia polemica a la vez en una descripción de Barcelona bajo el regimen homofóbico franquista.

The text offers an interpretation of a short story by terenci Moix, who used to be one of the most important queer writers in both Catalan and Spanish literature. This particular story is a polemique with Christian re-onterpretation of the story of Sodom as allegedly condemning "homosexuality". In a transhistoric move and not without the use of camp, Moix then makes it a story about the homophobic Barcelona under franquist regime.

The first English language monograph of Polish queer literature. Published in Peter Lang, Frankurt am Main, 2015. Pp. 252. Series: "Polish Studies" (vol. 14).

Contents: Sexual Fingerprint: Queer Diaries and the Enigmatic Signifier (Iwaszkiewicz, Andrzejewski, Gombrowicz, Białoszewski) – Julian Stryjkowski: Jewish vis-a-vis Queer – Two Psychoanalytic Scenarios in Witold Gombrowicz – Queering the Warsaw Uprising (With a Little Help From Miron Białoszewski) – Straight Yet Queer: Homoinfluence (Jerzy Andrzejewski, Czesław Miłosz), Straight Gay Story (Krzysztof Baczyński), Queer Fable (Academy of Mr. Kleks), Between Materiality and Symbolicalness of Skin (Sławomir Mrożek) – Central European Communist Camp.

A selection of works of the greatest Polish female writer of Romanticism, Narcyza Żmichowska, and the author of the greatest Polish gothic novel of the XIXth century ("Pagan Lady"), as well as of the first novel to include lesbian eroticism.

The document presents excerpts from count Zygmunt Krasiński's letters to Juliusz Słowacki, both are major Polish romantic poets, in the light of "romantic friendships" hypothesis as formulated by Lilian Faderman and others. As contexts "Werther" by Goethe and letters of Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz and Jerzy Andrzejewski are used.