This article confronts two acclaimed cancerographies dealing with breast cancer, Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals and Krystyna Kofta’s Lewa, wspomnienie prawej [The Left, Recollections of the Right]. The former was published in the 1980s in the United States; the latter, which contains sections from the writer’s diary written in 2002, was published the following year in Poland. Each memoir belongs to a different time and a socio- historical context; yet by discounting all the differences the article tries to identify the core pathographic readings, which are assumed to function primarily as social facts. Finally, the article argues the American critical and sociological understanding of the illness narrative is not always compatible with Polish cultural codes and conventions, and may lead to a misreading of Polish texts in that category.

This is an analysis of the applications and characteristics of the typography used in two volumes of poems, Trzysta cytryn do trzeciej potęgi tygrysa [Three Hundred Lemons to the Third Power of the Tiger] by Marcin Podlaski and żywe linie nowe usta [Live lines of new mouths] by Marcin Mokry. The aim is gain an understanding of the relationship between the text and its form. The typographical effects are examined one by one and in con-nection with their function in the author’s poetic project. Both collections are analyzed from the perspective of Jacques Rancière’s partage du sensible, i.e. a conceptual inclusion of everybody, including the mentally ill, by means of a literary form which engages both the intellect and the senses.

This article examines the role of insomnia in Emil Cioran’s philosophy. Taken as a whole, his work appears to be exceptionally significant both from the point of view of anthropology and illness narrative studies. There has never been any doubt that his life and work are dominated by a sense of ennui, loneliness and estrangement. Yet these themes are merely symptoms of more fundamental problems he grappled with, i.e. the grotesque nature everyday life, ecstasy in a life without gods, being an absolute-in-itself and absolute-for itself, etc. This study is focused on insomnia, treated as a primary anthropological category and studied with the help of phenomenological and hermen-eutical methodology. Drawing on, among others, the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and Arthur Schopenhauer, the article formulates a set of substantially new conceptual propositions that offer a new approach to the problematics of Cioran’s work.

This article presents an analysis of Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay L’Intrus (2002), a personal reflection on illness and the experience of heart transplantation. The analysis combines two approaches (though the first of them is given more prominence). Firstly, L’Intrus is treated as philosophical-literary pathography, where the reader’s attention is engrossed by the lived experience of illness and its linguistic representation – a sophisticated, elliptical, metaphorical style which exposes the altering intrusiveness of both the med-ical condition and the treatment (implanting an ‘alien’ organ). Secondly, L’Intrus is read in the context of Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophical reflection proper. The essay’s linguistic manipulation of singular and plural are interpreted as an echo of his philosophical position put forth in Être singulier pluriel. The totally individual experience of illness and suffering exposes the underlying ontological validity of ‘being-with’ others. The in-sight that there is no being (Dasein) without ‘being-with’ (Mitsein) leads in effect to a revision of a number of key philosophical concepts like the Self / the Other, the subject, identity, nature and technology (ecotechnology).

This article is an ecohauntological reading of Małgorzata Lebda’s novel Łakome [The Greedy] (2023). Its main purpose is to track down the Derridean ‘spectres’ that make their appearance as a result of the traumatic relationship between the main character and a rural world in the grip of an environmental degradation and the extinction of wildlife. The article proposes a psychoanalytic reading of the novel based on Ashlee Cunsolo’s notion of ‘ecological grief’, triggered by inexorable loss that occurs before the eyes of the protagonists. The experience of terminal illness tests and erodes the ‘I’, but also opens it to the outside world and, in effect, reveals a precious complex of relations between the human and non-human worlds.

This article discusses a selection of texts by contemporary Polish feminist female authors who explore the transgressive and queer aspects of pregnancy and motherhood. The analysis, indebted to the observations of Maggie Nelson’s essay The Argonauts (Polish transl. by K. Gucio, Wołowiec 2020), explore the ways in which Martyna Bunda, Izabela Morska, Barbara Klicka and Inga Iwasiów present motherhood as act of transgression and liberation from a reproductive control system. As a rule this type of discourse includes, the article notes, some elements of the illness narrative.

A Journey Round My Skull (Utazás a koponyám körül) is the most popular novel of the Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy. It is an autobiographical account of an illness – diagnosed as brain tumor – that he developed at the age of forty-nine. The book records his observations, thoughts and emotions, from the moment the first symptoms of the disease make themselves felt, through the long process of diagnosis to the ultimate surgery, conducted in Stockholm, which saved his life. Published in 1936, A Journey Round My Skull won both popular and critical acclaim. Also the international medical community found it a convincing piece of medical testimony. It was adapted for the stage and for the screen (in 1970). It was also translated into a number of languages, including English (1939) and Polish (2008).

This article attempts to identify figures of melancholy and death in Jadwiga Gamska- -Łempicka’s writings by drawing on Nancy K. Miller’s strategy of ‘overreading’. The analysis focuses on the essay ‘Moje Miasto’ [My Town], childhood recollections of Prze-myśl, and a handful of her poems. The texts, which spread out like a spider’s web, form a field, or a piece of tapestry inscribed with figures that preserve and conceal the author’s subjectivity. When properly read, they can reveal that complex profile, woven with threads of melancholic emotionality, depression and the temptation of death.

In her book L’usage de la photo, published in France in 2005, Annie Ernaux creates an inimitable personal narration to describe her experience of living with breast cancer. The book matches photographs of things that belonged to her and her partner as they were scattered all over the place the previous day with passages chronicling of the progress of her illness and the way it invades her daily life. The article argues that the experimental form enabled the author of L’usage de la photo to find a new perspective on her record of the female experience of cancer. The article analyzes both the photo-graphic parts of the narration, which, it seems, foreshadow the nearness of death, and the literary/autobiographical parts, which contain a frank record of living with cancer.

This article discusses the relationship between two types of pathography, the fictional (Michel Houellebecq’s Anéantir) and the authentic (Philippe Lançon’s Le Lambeau). The aim is to establish the status of the fictional pathography in the field of illness narrative.

This article discusses the problem of eating disorders in Sobibor, a Young Adult novel by the French writer Jean Molla in the light of illness narrative studies, the sick body aesthetics and physical sickness. The article goes over the narrator’s list of possible causes of her psychosomatic condition, i.e. family tensions, social pressure to conform to the prevailing beauty canon, and her own rebellion against the female identity. Emily’s narration combines two strands, a struggle with adolescent personal problems and the discovery of a nasty family secret. An analysis of her experiences and reflections reveals the connections between the anorexia/bulimia syndrome and the effects of a generational trauma. Her condition is complicated further by the revelation of her late grandfather’s Nazi past, an exemplary case of post-memory trauma. The article suggests that her anorexic vomiting is a an iconic gesture corresponding to the writing (i.e. getting something off one’s chest) of the story of her traumas (both her own and inherited from an earlier generation).