This article presents a critical interpretation of Barbara Klicka’s Zdrój [ The Spa] (2019) within the framework of the Spatial Turn. The analysis examines the relationship between the subject and the medical spaces with the help of concepts like heterotopia, atopia, psychotopography as well as the author’s own concept of topopathography. The aim is to explore the impact of the designated sanatorium space on the patient’s identity.

This article presents a model of reinterpretation of illness narratives from the cate-gory of autopathography to that of autosalutography, i.e. restorative/therapeutic auto-biography. The cases in point are Małgorzata Baranowska’s To jest wasze życie. Być sobą w chorobie przewlekłej [ This Is Your Life: How to Cope with a Chronic Illness] (1994) with their textual strategies of (re)negotiation of autonomy and agency. Drawing on the work of Elselijn Kingma, this analysis takes the constructivist approach to the opposition of health and illness. At the same time, the legacy notion of health with its punitive and oppressive implications, is substituted by the concept of wellbeing (as construed in Tanja Reiffenrath’s Memoirs of Wellbeing). The latter covers a broad range of lived experiences and upgrades the patient’s personal perspective, especially if it is applied within the socio-constructivist understanding of health and illness (disorder).

Studencki strajk jesienią 1981 r. był czasem wzmożonej studenckiej aktywności kulturalnej. Powstawały wówczas inicjatywy wydawnicze niezależne od cenzury. W tych też okolicznościach studenci zrzeszeni wokół Lubelskiego Klubu Dziennikarzy Studenckich wznowili „Biuletyn” Informacyjny”, którego pełny tytuł tym razem brzmiał „Biuletyn Informacyjny LKDS. Wydanie Strajkowe”. Postrzegane jako organ SZSP czasopismo nie zawsze było akceptowane przez młodzież skupioną w NZS, a jednocześnie budziło podejrzenia wśród władz PRL.

This is a critical reading of two Polish science-fiction novels of the post-Apocalypse subgenre, Cassandra’s Head by Marek Baraniecki and The Old Axolotl by Jacek Dukaj, with the help of concepts borrowed from the philosophical toolkit of Jacques Lacan. Each of the two books envisages an apocalyptic catastrophe and its consequences as well as the subsequent attempts to rebuild human civilization. The action in either novel is shaped by tensions between the Symbolic and the Real. The latter, though suppressed and shut out, keeps resurfacing, usually when it is least expected, leaving an indelible marks in the life of the survivors. An analysis of the handling of this conflict in the two novels offers a number of insights into the way these two fundamental modes (or, Lacanian orders) of human perception are integrated into the worlds of post-Apocalyptic fiction.

The discussion in this article is based on the assumption that the sociocultural dynamics of quixotism is common to many cultures and, as a consequence, each of them should produce its own version of the emblematic Don Quixote. The formula of this concept of quixotism comes from Magdalena Barbaruk’s studies in the field of theory and cultural practice, in which she probes into vast stretches of history, including the centuries after the publication of Cervantes’ novel as well as the epochs that preceded it. Accordingly, the circle of Quixote-like figures should include Ignatius Loyola, Saint James, Christopher Columbus, the Polish Romantic poet Juliusz Słowacki and Prince Myshkin from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot. The principal criterion for inclusion in this category is “to be a reader who walked out of the library so as to act in accordance with the books” (Magdalena Bodnaruk, ‘Don Kichote w naukach o kulturze’ [Don Quixote in Cultural Studies], in: Wieczna krucjata. Szkice o Don Kichocie [The Eternal Wandering: Essays on Don Quixote], Poznań 2016, p. 164). Taking that step results, as a matter of necessity, in a clash with the generally accepted rules and conventions. Moreover, while doing so the quixotic individual has to face the risk of having his heroism held up to ridicule or dismissed as folly.
This article puts up some additional candidates to Barbaruk’s short list of ‘Quixotes’ and considers the way in which their distinctive qualities may modify her quixotic formula. The first is the protagonist of the 1955 stage/screen adaptation of Cervantes’ novel by the Soviet Russian author Evgeny Schwartz. His Quixote is a knight errant who knows all too well that he defies people’s routines and expectations and yet remains true to himself and his ideals. He is aware that to ‘save the world’ he has to live and act in the boundary area between the profanum and the sacred, or the real world and a kind of fairyland. Therefore, what marks the timeless Quixote is the deliberate overstepping of a role sanctioned by the ruling consensus, and making a stand against the powers that be. The Middle Ages certainly produced many figures cast in that mould, among them Saint Gerald of Aurillac (whose Vita was written by Odo of Cluny). If a sharp, uncompromising view of reality is a distinct character trait of a quixotic personality, another figure that need to be added to the short list of is Buono, the good alter ego of Viscount Medardo, the protagonist of Italo Calvino’s novel The Cloven Viscount (1952). Finally, the article argues that a character who sets off on a journey (quest) which gives him the opportunity to perform noble (chivalric) deeds represents another version of a Quixotic knight errant. The case in point is Tristran from Neil Gaiman’s fairy tale fantasy Stardust.