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, 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 literary pathography, i.e. texts which purport to project rage or a mental disorder, and use narrative strategies adopted specifically for that purpose. The analysis is focused on two novels by Aleksandra Zielińska, Przypadek Alicji (Alicja’s Case) and Bura i szał (Bura and Rage) treated as literary representations of the protagonists' mental condition. The literary character of these 'records' is revealed by multiple intertextual tropes and poetic devices that deconstruct the cultural stereotype of female rage. Consequently, Aleksandra Zielińska's novels should be seen as projections of a fractured female subject (un sujet divisé) fixed on her somatic vulnerability, driven by an urge to cry out her affliction, trauma and rage, unease about woman-to-woman relations, and the pressure of erratic affective impulses.

This is an analysis of the literary expressions of fear in the poetry of Kazimierz Przerwa-Tetmajer. Intense fear is not only one of the dominant emotions depicted in his work but it also underpins his poetic technique. The article examines the manner in which he communicates the somatic experience of dread, his use of bodily metaphors in descriptions of nature, his poetic landscapes of fear, the records of his nightmares, the modernist phobophobia as well the sources of the high anxiety (to do with the mysteries of life, death and man’s inner life) that dogged him at all times. In its readings the article draws on the studies in affect theory, somatopoetics and psychoanalytic criticism.

The aim of this article is to show how Kazimierz Przerwa-Tetmajer depicts the creative process in his autothematic poems. The readings draw on the interpretative strategies of the theory of affect (primarily the work Ernst van Alphen, Teresa Brennan and Brian Massumi) and somatic criticism (e.g. Anna Łebkowska’s somatopoetics, Marta Smo-lińska’s ‘augmented haptics’). In the great majority of Przerwa-Tetmajer’s poems dealing with the process of poetic creation, we are told that it is triggered by an explosion of the affects or an overpowering divine inspiration, bordering on madness. The article ana-lyzes in turn the affective nature of the creative process and the affective perception of a work of art; the image of the artist as craftsman; and, finally, the image of the phantas-matic woman, a product of the act of creation.