This article takes as its starting point the Greek term μεταξύ, a preposition meaning ‘between’, first turned into a noun in Plato’s Symposium, and in that substantivized form adapted for their own ends by a number of 20th-century philosophers, most notably by Simone Weil. In her Gravity and Grace (French: La Pesanteur et la grâce) she defines le metaxu as in-betweenness, a social and metaphysical category which embraces all that connects and divides (as, for example, a wall that both separates two prisoners and can be used by them to tap messages). In this article Weil’s concept of metaxu is applied to the language and then to various readings of two of Wisława Szymborska’s poems, ‘Funeral’ and ‘Elegiac Calculation’. Pragmalinguistics and semantics, too, play a role in the interpretation of these poems.

This article is built on the premise that the topos has become a potent unit of cultural memory, an image that stores a wealth of often vague, buried or forgotten ideas. Its contents, like those of literature, tend to become extraordinarily condensed and confl ated; in consequence, some topoi (in particular the Holocaust topos) defy conventional tools of understanding and analysis. A solution to this problem can be found in an approach which broadens the scope of the sources of the Holocaust to include pop culture; gives up the rigid classifi cation of topoi, based on ‘hard’, documentary evidence; and, draws on a conceptual frame that connects the topos with the mechanisms of remembrance. A practical application of this approach is offered here in a series of readings of selected passages from Marcin Pilis’s novel The Meadow of the Dead (Łąka umarłych), Zygmunt Miłoszewski’s crime story A Grain of Truth (Ziarno prawdy), Marcin Wolski’s alternate history novel Wallenrod, Justyna Wydra’s war romance The SS-man and a Jewess (Esesman i Żydówka), Krzysztof Zajas’s thriller Oszpicyn [local Yiddish: Auschwitz] as well as some poems by Jacek Podsiadło from his volume The Breguet Overcoil (Włos Bregueta).

This article, focused principally on the exploration of contingency, the body and disgust in Michał Witkowski’s novel Margot, is also a polemic and a vindication of the book against the barrage of criticism it received from its reviewers. Most of them decided that Margot was a novel about nothing, a haphazard mix of sundry discourses devoid of any linear structure. In fact, several critics blamed the author of giving away both the narrative structure and the plot to capricious contingency. The article takes a fi rm stance against such charges and argues that contingency does not need to be seen as a fault at all. It lies at the heart of the novel and determines the actions of characters, but it plays as important a role in people’s lives outside fi ction. Analysing the ups and down of the main characters (Margot and Wadek Mandarynka), the article explains the function of emotions, the body, the characters’ language and their ideas of sacrum in the legitimization of contingency. A special role in this mechanism is played by disgust. Reactions of disgust are always contingent, or, as Julia Kristeva puts it the abject has the power to terrorize the subject to such extent that he can do nothing but to succumb to contingency. In working out the idea of the contingency of selfhood, the article also draws on Richard Rorty’s approach, and in particular his concept of ironism. The latter is used to classify the main character of Witkowski’s book as a consummate ironist, i.e. a person who tests different languages in which the world can be described in order to pursue his carnal desires. Finally, the article argues that in his novel Witkowski not only brings to light the fortuitous character of the postmodern identity but also creates a heterogeneous language to express it.

This article deals with recent Polish herstory narrations, i.e. works of fiction that, while relying on distinctly literary techniques and devices, foreground the feminine experience of history, and moreover, may be associated with the so-called Herstory Turn in Polish humanities and cultural studies. This category of fictions includes also novels in which the herstory narration belongs to a female subject created by a male author, notably Jacek Dehnel’s Abbess Macryna (Matka Makryna), Ignacy Karpowicz’s Little Sonya (Sońka) and Jarosław Kamiński’s Just Lola (Tylko Lola). These three novels are analyzed with the aim of showing how their narrative strategy foregrounds the women narrators/main characters (acting as history’s true subjects), identifying the marks of authorial imitation of the feminine discourse, and, finally, asking the question about man’s status in an ostensibly feminine text. It seems that one way of answering it would be to point to the male author’s validating the feminine experience of history and ensuring that it can be heard.