Humanities and Social Sciences

Ruch Literacki

ISSN

ISSN 0035-9602

Publishers

Polska Akademia Nauk Oddział w Krakowie Komisja Historycznoliteracka, Uniwersytet Jagielloński Wydział Polonistyki

Redaktor naczelna

Anna Łebkowska

Sekretarz redakcji

Iwona Boruszkowska

Rada Naukowa

Maria Delaperrière, INALCO, Paryż, Francja

Halina Filipowicz, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, USA

David Frick, University of California, Berkeley, USA

Bożena Karwowska, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

Komitet Redakcyjny

Iwona Boruszkowska Uniwersytet Jagielloński, Kraków, Polska

Tomasz Bilczewski, Uniwersytet Jagielloński, Kraków, Polska

Andrzej Borowski, Uniwersytet Jagielloński, Kraków, Polska

Tadeusz Bujnicki, Uniwersytet Jagielloński, Kraków, Polska

Anna Czabanowska-Wróbel, Uniwersytet Jagielloński, Kraków, Polska

Anna Łebkowska, Uniwersytet Jagielloński, Kraków, Polska

Roman Mazurkiewicz, Uniwersytet Pedagogiczny, Kraków, Polska

Jan Michalik, Uniwersytet Jagielloński, Kraków, Polska

Jan Okoń, Uniwersytet Łódzki, Łódź, Polska

Magdalena Siwiec, Uniwersytet Jagielloński, Kraków, Polska

Eugenia Prokop-Janiec, Uniwersytet Jagielloński, Kraków, Polska

Wacław Walecki, Uniwersytet Jagielloński, Kraków, Polska

Polska Akademia Nauk
Oddział w Krakowie
ul. św. Jana 28
31-018 Kraków
tel. +48 12 256-23-00
fax. +48 12 256-23-80
e-mail: ruchliteracki@uj.edu.pl

Volumes
Instructions for authors

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Content

Ruch Literacki | 2023 | No 4 (379)

1 Writing under the martial law regime and reparative reading: Origins and benefits of literary fragility

Iwona Boruszkowska

Ruch Literacki | 2023 | No 4 (379) | 447-462 | DOI: 10.24425/rl.2023.148297

Keywords: health humanities illness narrative theory state of emergency writing restorative reading fragility reparability Giorgio Agamben (b. 1942)

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Abstract

This article presents a theoretical framework and a network of concepts that could be useful in analyzing illness narratives. As a relatively new field of the humanities, the cultural discourse of health and illness is still in need of an appropriate methodology and a set of handy concepts, i.e. a foundational cultural theory fit to deal with texts con-cerned with the specific experience of health and illness. Here the key concepts are fragility, reparability, vulnerability and harm. While drawing on the idea of ‘writing in a state of emergency’, based on Giorgio Agamben’s discussion in The State of Exception, the article also offers the author’s own conceptions of a ‘fragile alliance’ and of reading illness narratives as a therapeutic (restorative) activity.

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Authors and Affiliations

Iwona Boruszkowska

e-mail:

ORCID:

Uniwersytet Jagielloński

2 Chronic fatigue: The heroines of illness narratives

Monika Ładoń

Ruch Literacki | 2023 | No 4 (379) | 463-480 | DOI: 10.24425/rl.2023.148298

Keywords: health humanities chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) pain burnout society illness narratives Anne Boyer (b. 1973) Byung-Chul Han (b. 1959)

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Abstract

This article deals with chronic fatigue, one of the characteristic features of contem-porary illness narratives written by women authors. First, it focuses on Małgorzata Ba-ranowska’s To jest wasze życie. Być sobą w chorobie przewlekłej [ This Is Your Life: How to Cope with a Chronic Illness], a story of her own life impaired by SLE (systemic lupus erythe-matosus). The descriptions of her experiences (the disruption of her daily life caused by chronic pain and her attempts make sense of it) provides a frame for the reading of other narratives, Anne Boyer’s The Undying and two journalistic texts on endometriosis, one by Dr Katarzyna Szopa and the other by Dr Karolina Wigura. The article defines chronic fatigue as a social condition which combines a resistance to regenerative therapies with the stress of having to act in demanding situations of real life. The precarious condition of exhausted bodies hovering between a life fully lived and a debilitating morbidity is compared with Byung-Chul Han’s philosophy developed in The Burnout Society and The Palliative Society: Pain Today (originally published in German in 2010 and 2020 respec-tively).

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Authors and Affiliations

Monika Ładoń

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ORCID:

Uniwersytet Śląski w Katowicach

3 Broken expectations for a child: Miscarriage in the context of matrifocality

Małgorzata Okupnik

Ruch Literacki | 2023 | No 4 (379) | 481-496 | DOI: 10.24425/rl.2023.148299

Keywords: health humanities matrifocality autopathography Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) Oriana Fallaci (1929–2006) (b. 1987)

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Abstract

This article examines the artworks – treated as personal testimonies – by three wo-men, whose biographies could not have been more different, affected by pregnancy loss. They are Frida Kahlo’s Henry Ford Hospital, a surrealist representation of an induced abortion she had in 1932; Oriana Fallaci’s Letter to a Child Never Born (originally published in 1975); and Karolina Kaczyńska-Piwko’s Ciałość [ Bodiness] (2021). In spite of the huge time gaps that separated those three lives, their experiences connected with the loss of an unborn child have a lot in common. Each of them had to cope with loneliness, lack of support and indifference to their grief. The dominant element in Kahlo’s painting as well as Fallaci and Kaczyńska-Piwko’s narratives is the trauma of broken expectations for a happy motherhood.

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Authors and Affiliations

Małgorzata Okupnik

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Akademia Muzyczna im. I.J. Paderewskiego w Poznaniu

4 “I don’t give that hulk a chance”: Depression: an illness or disillusionment?

Hanna Serkowska

Ruch Literacki | 2023 | No 4 (379) | 497-513 | DOI: 10.24425/rl.2023.148300

Keywords: health humanities depression mental health disenchantment psychiatric clinic Olga Hund (b. 1986)

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Abstract

The subject of depression, often driven by personal experience, has lately become very prominent in the public sphere. Olga Hund's Psy ras drobnych [Dogs of Smaller Breeds] (2018) is a novel about depression, though unlike many European films and novels, it does not blame the condition on the individual – the main character of the story. Her book is memoir of sorts, a series of dramatic scenes from a mental ward of the Kobierzyn Psychiatric Hospital in Cracow. The whole is written, we may assume, to provoke out-rage: it is an accusation of the health care system, yet the blame for the mental condition rather than the wrong therapy, is put squarely on the structures and socio-economic mechanisms of the neoliberal society. The book makes two points. First, the psychiatric hospital by its very nature is a total institution that’s totally indispensable; and second – as seen from the interface of the ‘normal’ people and the mental patients – the social, economic and ideological factors have a significant role in generating suffering and the mental illness itself.

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Authors and Affiliations

Hanna Serkowska

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Uniwersytet Warszawski

5 Autosalutography: Emancipatory strategies of negotiating wellbeing in the texts of Małgorzata Baranowska

Maria Świątkowska

Ruch Literacki | 2023 | No 4 (379) | 515-533 | DOI: 10.24425/rl.2023.148301

Keywords: health humanities illness narratives restorative/therapeutic autobiography wellbeing Małgorzata Baranowska (1945–2012) Elselijn Kingma (b. 1981) Tanja Reiffenrath

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Abstract

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).

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Authors and Affiliations

Maria Świątkowska

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Szkoła Doktorska Nauk Humanistycznych UJ

6 “I was tearing out pieces of my body…”. Between art and illness narratives: The mutilated body in Rakhel Feygenberg’s narration

Sylwia Stokłosa

Ruch Literacki | 2023 | No 4 (379) | 535-548 | DOI: 10.24425/rl.2023.148302

Keywords: Polish-Jewish relations in the late 19th century autobiography nomadic subjects community of women illness narratives self-mutilation Rakhel Feygenberg (1885– 1972)

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Abstract

This article attempts to create a multivariant story about a community of women in the Polish-Jewish contact zone based on the text of Rakhel Feygenberg’s Di kinder-yorn [Polish title: A Girl’s Years: Childhood in a Polesie Shtetl], an autobiography of a Jewish young woman who grew up in Eastern Europe at the turn of the 19th century. Using personal insights and documentary evidence she portrays a community of women read-ers who are engaged in never-ending rounds of watching and sounding each other.

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Authors and Affiliations

Sylwia Stokłosa

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Ośrodek Międzyobszarowych Indywidualnych Studiów Humanistycznych i Społecznych UJ

7 Beyond the space of everyday experience: Barbara Klicka’s Zdrój as a sanatorium narrative

Wiktoria Kulak

Ruch Literacki | 2023 | No 4 (379) | 549-566 | DOI: 10.24425/rl.2023.148303

Keywords: health humanities the Spatial Turn sanatorium rehabilitation session heterotopias topopathography affect Barbara Klicka (b. 1981)

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Abstract

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.

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Authors and Affiliations

Wiktoria Kulak

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Wydział Polonistyki UJ

8 Experiencing illness and the sick body in Halina Poświatowska’s poetry: The somapoetic approach Summary

Michalina Smyczyńska

Ruch Literacki | 2023 | No 4 (379) | 569-581 | DOI: 10.24425/rl.2023.148304

Keywords: Polish literature of the 20th century health humanities somapoetics sensuality tactile experience and language illness narratives écriture feminine Halina Poświatowska (1935–1967)

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Abstract

This is an analysis of some selected poems by Halina Poświatowska using the ap-proach and conceptual tools of somapoetics. The discussion focuses in turn on the manifestations of the (sick) body in Poświatowska’s poems and poetic prose (especially when its connected with special sound effects), the verbalization of sensory experience (primarily with regard to the sense of touch) and the role of the sick woman’s body in her poetic world (including direct references to the sick body in the act of writing). The critical strategy employed in this article is intended to complement the legacy readings of Poświatowska’s work with a functional, somapoetic interpretation that would give full scope to her narrative of the ailing body.

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Authors and Affiliations

Michalina Smyczyńska

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Uniwersytet Jagielloński

9 All the world’s illnessess: Themes of ill health in Małgorzata Lebda’s poetry

Weronika Bukowska

Ruch Literacki | 2023 | No 4 (379) | 583-599 | DOI: 10.24425/rl.2023.148305

Keywords: Polish contemporary poetry illness ecopoetics trauma loss and grief Małgorzata Lebda (b. 1985)

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Abstract

This article explores the themes and imagery of ill health in Małgorzata Lebda’s poetry. In the poetic triptych Sprawy ziemi [ Matters of the Earth] (2020) she keeps return-ing to the experience of illness and grieves for the loss of both parents (first her mother, then her father) and a missing sister, whose memory was blotted out from family history. In fact, though, Granica lasu [ The Forest Border] (2013) and Matecznik [ Wildwood] (2016) can be seen as earlier attempts to come to terms with all those traumas by transforming them into the texture of her poems. Similarly, the mysterious elder sister who has haunted the poets’ dreams is conjured up in the Sny uckermärkerów [ The Uckermärkers’ Dreams] (2019). The final part of the triptych makes is clear that both sisters bear an in-delible mark of illness, which, in one way or another, is omnipresent in Lebda’s poetic world. It is a tough world where illness and death spares no man, animal or plant.

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Authors and Affiliations

Weronika Bukowska

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Uniwersytet Jagielloński

10 Sleeping with the enemy: Anna Janko’s Finalistka – a novel about the relationship with one’s own body

Aleksandra E. Banot

Ruch Literacki | 2023 | No 4 (379) | 601-615 | DOI: 10.24425/rl.2023.148306

Keywords: Polish literature of the 21st century health humanities illness narratives ageing the body feminism Anna Janko (b. 1957)

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Abstract

Anna Janko’s latest novel Finalistka [ The Finalist] (2021) contains a catalogue of ill-nesses that the main character, the poet Hanka M., has to struggle with. The book, which in many ways resembles a patient’s diary, is a record of the battles Hanka, the author’s alter ego, has to fight with the enemy which happens to be her own body. The article considers the strategies she employs to hold her body in check as it repeatedly lets her down and, in effect, becomes her enemy. Its disconcerting strangeness strikes her every time she slips into a search for the signs and symptoms of ageing (her reflections at this point are compared with those of Simone de Beauvoir and some other writers). In Finalistka suffering from illnesses is inscribed into life’s transience which is not just human but universal, and at the same time particular, affecting both men and women. Nonetheless, it is the woman’s perspective that this article finds more interesting.

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Authors and Affiliations

Aleksandra E. Banot

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Uniwersytet Bielsko-Bialski

11 Choroba jako wezwanie do opowieści

Arthur W. Frank , Iwona Boruszkowska , Barbara Woźniak

Ruch Literacki | 2023 | No 4 (379) | 619-638 | DOI: 10.24425/rl.2023.148307

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Authors and Affiliations

Arthur W. Frank

Iwona Boruszkowska

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ORCID:

Barbara Woźniak

Professor Emeritus, University of Calgary
Wydział Polonistyki, Uniwersytet Jagielloński
Collegium Medicum, Uniwersytet Jagielloński

Instructions for authors

„Ruch Literacki” jest czasopismem polonistycznym i publikuje teksty dotyczące literatury polskiej (interpretacje), teorii literatury i komparatystyki.

Propozycje artykułów (do 41 000 znaków) należy przesyłać w wersji drukowanej i elektronicznej: w wersji drukowanej na adres redakcji: ul. św. Jana 28, 31-018 Kraków, w wersji elektronicznej – mailem na adres” ruchliteracki@gmail.com(lub na płycie CD dołączonej do wydruku). Prosimy o dostosowanie aparatu przypisów do zasad obowiązujących w „Ruchu Literackim”. Tekst nie może być wcześniej publikowany.

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