Julia Fiedorczuk | University of Warsaw (original) (raw)
Papers by Julia Fiedorczuk
World Literature Today, 2014
This article aims to read Forrest Gander's Pulitzer-winning 2018 volume, Be With, in the context ... more This article aims to read Forrest Gander's Pulitzer-winning 2018 volume, Be With, in the context of Judith Butler's notion of vulnerability and the Buddhist concept of interbeing, introduced by Thích Nhất Hạnh. Gander's search for a poetics of listening reaches a new intensity in Be With, a poetic lament for a deceased beloved. In this groundbreaking work, grief becomes a means of knowing the world where knowledge is understood "not as recitation but as/ the unhinging somatic event" (Gander 2018, 28). The new way of engaging with the world triggers a subjective reconfiguration that leads to the articulation of a deeply empathic poetics of vulnerability which becomes the basis for telling new stories of human, interspecies, and mineral entanglements.
Lawrence Buell (b. 1939) is currently a Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature at Harva... more Lawrence Buell (b. 1939) is currently a Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature at Harvard University. His scholarly interests include nineteenth-century American literature, postcolonial Anglophone literatures and literature and the environment. One of the most outstanding researchers of American Transcendentalism and a pioneer of ecocriticism, Buell has published six books, the most recent of which is The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (Blackwell, 2005), an important study marking the author’s shift from first-wave to second-wave ecocritical analysis. His book on Emerson (Emerson, Harvard University Press, 2003) earned him the Warren-Brooks Award for outstanding literary criticism and Writing for an Endangered World (Harvard University Press, 2001) received the 2001 John G. Cawelti Award for the best book in the field of American Culture Studies. Buell’s interest in environmental issues, considered especially in connection...
One of the consequences of the postcolonial turn in literary studies, initiated by the publicatio... more One of the consequences of the postcolonial turn in literary studies, initiated by the publication of Edward Said’s seminal Orientalism (1978), has been the proliferation of critical writings about Anglophone literature’s fascination with non-European cultures. Modernist poetry’s relationship with the Orient has been examined, among other critics, by Zhaoming Qian, the author of the monograph Orientalism and Modernism (1995) and the editor of a recent collection of essays Modernism and the Orient (2013).1 Since no other modern poet, or perhaps no other 20th century literary figure, had such an intense relationship with Chinese culture as Ezra Pound, it is hardly surprising that this new trend has contributed to a renewed interest in his work. In his introduction to Ezra Pound and China, the most comprehensive study of this issue that has appeared to date, Qian states that “to address Pound’s relation to China is to address one of the knottiest issues in poetic modernism” (1). In 200...
Though Marianne Moore’s status as one of the most important poets of the first half of the twenti... more Though Marianne Moore’s status as one of the most important poets of the first half of the twentieth century is no longer subject to dispute, she is still considered as an eccentric or even a misfit whose exact place on the map of modernist poetry remains undetermined. With her old-fashioned religious views, her peculiar appearance including the three-cornered hat almost more famous than her best known poems, and her unswerving immunity to erotic passions, she cuts a unique figure among modernist writers. The only woman poet to have been treated with any degree of seriousness by the patriarchs of early twentieth-century Anglo-American avant-garde, including Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, she has been admired for her meticulously descriptive and yet artful style; however, her insistence on the ethical import of mimesis, dictated by her attitude of humility towards the material reality of the world, complicates her relationships with modernism. Like Laura Riding, another idiosyncratic ch...
Gary Snyder is a poet and essayist as well as a social and environmental activist. He began his c... more Gary Snyder is a poet and essayist as well as a social and environmental activist. He began his career in the 1950s as a member of the Beat Generation (Japhy Ryder, one of the characters in Jack Kerouac’s novel The Dharma Bums, is inspired by Snyder). Since early childhood he has been deeply interested in wild nature, and as a young man he took up snow-peak mountaineering. Simultaneously, he started studying oriental languages and anthropology, in between his studies working as a lumberjack, a trail maker and a firewatcher. In the years 1956–1969 he lived mostly in Japan, practicing Zen and reading books about ecology. His first published books were Riprap (1959) and Myths and Texts (1960). The collection of poems Turtle Island (1974) brought him the Pulitzer Prize. After returning to the United States, Snyder built his own house—along the Yuba River in the northern Sierra Nevada Mountains—where he has lived since. His writing and activism are intimately connected with his Buddhist ...
ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2018
World Literature Today, 2017
World Literature Today, 2014
Polish Journal of American Studies, 2009
Polish Journal for American Studies, 2013
World Literature Today nr 91 (1), 2017
Against the background of the Polish parliament's consideration of a law that would effectively b... more Against the background of the Polish parliament's consideration of a law that would effectively ban abortion and the ensuing protests, Julia Fiedorczuk reflects on a particular aspect of women's strangeness in contemporary Poland-their alienation from highbrow literary culturewhich she finds especially conspicuous in the case of poetry. 1 "Women are strangers in the country of man," wrote Laura Riding in the 1930s, as militant, nationalistic sentiments intensified across Europe. I read that sentence, along with Riding's other writings on womanhood, as a graduate student toiling slowly on a dissertation about this remarkable poet's work. In the context of turn-of-the century feminist theories' tendency to complicate the notion of femininity, Riding's pronouncement sounded a little archaic, if not downright mystical. After all, many women felt perfectly at home in that "country," and many men did not. And who were those women, anyway, women in the plural, as opposed to the singularity of "man"? Fifteen years later, in the fall of 2016, as I am sitting down to write this essay, a wave of protests moves across my country in reaction to a proposed new law under discussion in the Polish parliament that would effectively ban abortion. Women of various backgrounds and outlooks experience a powerful moment of solidarity. Even though the sense of female fellowship soon begins to fade as the protests evolve and diversify, with some women formulating more radical demands that other women find impossible to support, feminism, after years of dormancy in the ivory towers of academia, is back in the streets. Women rediscover the shared aspects of their experiences, often connected with humiliation, objectification, and silencing, all linked with male domination, represented in the present situation by the combined forces of right-wing government and the Catholic Church. In spite of all the differences, many women experience a similar sense of alienation in the world where massive antifeminist backlash accompanies a resurgence of aggressive nationalistic feelings. Since the nation-state is by its very nature militant, it must idealize violence. As much of our public discourse, and even some of our highbrow literature, extolls mythologized images of men with guns, women are pushed back to the niches of traditional femininity-to strangeness. Whether this collective experience will form the basis for a sustained and effective twenty-firstcentury women's movement still remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: something happened in the past few months that caused many of us to (re)awaken.
Polish Journal for American Studies - Yearbook of the Polish Association for American Studies, 2017
Instances by Jeongrye Choi. Hillman teaches at St. Mary's College where she is the Olivia C. Fili... more Instances by Jeongrye Choi. Hillman teaches at St. Mary's College where she is the Olivia C. Filippi Professor of Poetry; she is an activist for social and environmental justice. Hillman's poems draw on elements of found texts and documents, personal meditation, observation, and literary theory. Often described as "sensuous" and "luminescent," her work investigates and pushes at the possibilities of form and voice, while remaining grounded in topics such as geology, the environment, politics, family, and spirituality.
The Polish Journal of Aesthetics, 2020
This article aims to read Forrest Gander's Pulitzer-winning 2018 volume, Be With, in the context ... more This article aims to read Forrest Gander's Pulitzer-winning 2018 volume, Be With, in the context of Judith Butler's notion of vulnerability and the Buddhist concept of interbeing, introduced by Thích Nhất Hạnh. Gander's search for a poetics of listening reaches a new intensity in Be With, a poetic lament for a deceased beloved. In this groundbreaking work, grief becomes a means of knowing the world where knowledge is understood "not as recitation but as/ the unhinging somatic event" (Gander 2018, 28). The new way of engaging with the world triggers a subjective reconfiguration that leads to the articulation of a deeply empathic poetics of vulnerability which becomes the basis for telling new stories of human, interspecies, and mineral entanglements.
Monografia "Cormac McCarthy red. M. Paryż, Wydawnictwo UW , 2014
The paper attempts to look at Schulz poetics in the light of object oriented ontology in order to... more The paper attempts to look at Schulz poetics in the light of object oriented ontology in order to demonstrate that the fascinating power of his prose derives, among other sources, from "thing power" (Jane Bennett's phrase) expressed in his fiction.
World Literature Today, 2014
This article aims to read Forrest Gander's Pulitzer-winning 2018 volume, Be With, in the context ... more This article aims to read Forrest Gander's Pulitzer-winning 2018 volume, Be With, in the context of Judith Butler's notion of vulnerability and the Buddhist concept of interbeing, introduced by Thích Nhất Hạnh. Gander's search for a poetics of listening reaches a new intensity in Be With, a poetic lament for a deceased beloved. In this groundbreaking work, grief becomes a means of knowing the world where knowledge is understood "not as recitation but as/ the unhinging somatic event" (Gander 2018, 28). The new way of engaging with the world triggers a subjective reconfiguration that leads to the articulation of a deeply empathic poetics of vulnerability which becomes the basis for telling new stories of human, interspecies, and mineral entanglements.
Lawrence Buell (b. 1939) is currently a Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature at Harva... more Lawrence Buell (b. 1939) is currently a Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature at Harvard University. His scholarly interests include nineteenth-century American literature, postcolonial Anglophone literatures and literature and the environment. One of the most outstanding researchers of American Transcendentalism and a pioneer of ecocriticism, Buell has published six books, the most recent of which is The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (Blackwell, 2005), an important study marking the author’s shift from first-wave to second-wave ecocritical analysis. His book on Emerson (Emerson, Harvard University Press, 2003) earned him the Warren-Brooks Award for outstanding literary criticism and Writing for an Endangered World (Harvard University Press, 2001) received the 2001 John G. Cawelti Award for the best book in the field of American Culture Studies. Buell’s interest in environmental issues, considered especially in connection...
One of the consequences of the postcolonial turn in literary studies, initiated by the publicatio... more One of the consequences of the postcolonial turn in literary studies, initiated by the publication of Edward Said’s seminal Orientalism (1978), has been the proliferation of critical writings about Anglophone literature’s fascination with non-European cultures. Modernist poetry’s relationship with the Orient has been examined, among other critics, by Zhaoming Qian, the author of the monograph Orientalism and Modernism (1995) and the editor of a recent collection of essays Modernism and the Orient (2013).1 Since no other modern poet, or perhaps no other 20th century literary figure, had such an intense relationship with Chinese culture as Ezra Pound, it is hardly surprising that this new trend has contributed to a renewed interest in his work. In his introduction to Ezra Pound and China, the most comprehensive study of this issue that has appeared to date, Qian states that “to address Pound’s relation to China is to address one of the knottiest issues in poetic modernism” (1). In 200...
Though Marianne Moore’s status as one of the most important poets of the first half of the twenti... more Though Marianne Moore’s status as one of the most important poets of the first half of the twentieth century is no longer subject to dispute, she is still considered as an eccentric or even a misfit whose exact place on the map of modernist poetry remains undetermined. With her old-fashioned religious views, her peculiar appearance including the three-cornered hat almost more famous than her best known poems, and her unswerving immunity to erotic passions, she cuts a unique figure among modernist writers. The only woman poet to have been treated with any degree of seriousness by the patriarchs of early twentieth-century Anglo-American avant-garde, including Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, she has been admired for her meticulously descriptive and yet artful style; however, her insistence on the ethical import of mimesis, dictated by her attitude of humility towards the material reality of the world, complicates her relationships with modernism. Like Laura Riding, another idiosyncratic ch...
Gary Snyder is a poet and essayist as well as a social and environmental activist. He began his c... more Gary Snyder is a poet and essayist as well as a social and environmental activist. He began his career in the 1950s as a member of the Beat Generation (Japhy Ryder, one of the characters in Jack Kerouac’s novel The Dharma Bums, is inspired by Snyder). Since early childhood he has been deeply interested in wild nature, and as a young man he took up snow-peak mountaineering. Simultaneously, he started studying oriental languages and anthropology, in between his studies working as a lumberjack, a trail maker and a firewatcher. In the years 1956–1969 he lived mostly in Japan, practicing Zen and reading books about ecology. His first published books were Riprap (1959) and Myths and Texts (1960). The collection of poems Turtle Island (1974) brought him the Pulitzer Prize. After returning to the United States, Snyder built his own house—along the Yuba River in the northern Sierra Nevada Mountains—where he has lived since. His writing and activism are intimately connected with his Buddhist ...
ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2018
World Literature Today, 2017
World Literature Today, 2014
Polish Journal of American Studies, 2009
Polish Journal for American Studies, 2013
World Literature Today nr 91 (1), 2017
Against the background of the Polish parliament's consideration of a law that would effectively b... more Against the background of the Polish parliament's consideration of a law that would effectively ban abortion and the ensuing protests, Julia Fiedorczuk reflects on a particular aspect of women's strangeness in contemporary Poland-their alienation from highbrow literary culturewhich she finds especially conspicuous in the case of poetry. 1 "Women are strangers in the country of man," wrote Laura Riding in the 1930s, as militant, nationalistic sentiments intensified across Europe. I read that sentence, along with Riding's other writings on womanhood, as a graduate student toiling slowly on a dissertation about this remarkable poet's work. In the context of turn-of-the century feminist theories' tendency to complicate the notion of femininity, Riding's pronouncement sounded a little archaic, if not downright mystical. After all, many women felt perfectly at home in that "country," and many men did not. And who were those women, anyway, women in the plural, as opposed to the singularity of "man"? Fifteen years later, in the fall of 2016, as I am sitting down to write this essay, a wave of protests moves across my country in reaction to a proposed new law under discussion in the Polish parliament that would effectively ban abortion. Women of various backgrounds and outlooks experience a powerful moment of solidarity. Even though the sense of female fellowship soon begins to fade as the protests evolve and diversify, with some women formulating more radical demands that other women find impossible to support, feminism, after years of dormancy in the ivory towers of academia, is back in the streets. Women rediscover the shared aspects of their experiences, often connected with humiliation, objectification, and silencing, all linked with male domination, represented in the present situation by the combined forces of right-wing government and the Catholic Church. In spite of all the differences, many women experience a similar sense of alienation in the world where massive antifeminist backlash accompanies a resurgence of aggressive nationalistic feelings. Since the nation-state is by its very nature militant, it must idealize violence. As much of our public discourse, and even some of our highbrow literature, extolls mythologized images of men with guns, women are pushed back to the niches of traditional femininity-to strangeness. Whether this collective experience will form the basis for a sustained and effective twenty-firstcentury women's movement still remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: something happened in the past few months that caused many of us to (re)awaken.
Polish Journal for American Studies - Yearbook of the Polish Association for American Studies, 2017
Instances by Jeongrye Choi. Hillman teaches at St. Mary's College where she is the Olivia C. Fili... more Instances by Jeongrye Choi. Hillman teaches at St. Mary's College where she is the Olivia C. Filippi Professor of Poetry; she is an activist for social and environmental justice. Hillman's poems draw on elements of found texts and documents, personal meditation, observation, and literary theory. Often described as "sensuous" and "luminescent," her work investigates and pushes at the possibilities of form and voice, while remaining grounded in topics such as geology, the environment, politics, family, and spirituality.
The Polish Journal of Aesthetics, 2020
This article aims to read Forrest Gander's Pulitzer-winning 2018 volume, Be With, in the context ... more This article aims to read Forrest Gander's Pulitzer-winning 2018 volume, Be With, in the context of Judith Butler's notion of vulnerability and the Buddhist concept of interbeing, introduced by Thích Nhất Hạnh. Gander's search for a poetics of listening reaches a new intensity in Be With, a poetic lament for a deceased beloved. In this groundbreaking work, grief becomes a means of knowing the world where knowledge is understood "not as recitation but as/ the unhinging somatic event" (Gander 2018, 28). The new way of engaging with the world triggers a subjective reconfiguration that leads to the articulation of a deeply empathic poetics of vulnerability which becomes the basis for telling new stories of human, interspecies, and mineral entanglements.
Monografia "Cormac McCarthy red. M. Paryż, Wydawnictwo UW , 2014
The paper attempts to look at Schulz poetics in the light of object oriented ontology in order to... more The paper attempts to look at Schulz poetics in the light of object oriented ontology in order to demonstrate that the fascinating power of his prose derives, among other sources, from "thing power" (Jane Bennett's phrase) expressed in his fiction.