The text analyses the documentation of the periodic evaluation of academic teachers at 22 Polish universities with the faculties of Pedagogy, shows the conditions of this evaluation and characterises its procedure. The content analysis reveals what issues in the internal regulatory documents establish the periodic evaluation of academic teachers and its procedure, as well as the extent to which they are represented in these documents. In order to fully describe the regulations and to explore the differences among the universities in the area of teacher evaluation, the authors used a statistical analysis. The results show a wide variation of the elements that are included in the internal documents regulating the periodic evaluation of academic teachers. The authors refer to the contemporary press and media discussion on the condition of universities and the directions of their development. They interpret the findings referring also to the contemporary perception of a university as an enterprise as well as to strong bureaucracy at the universities and its adverse impact on their evaluation system.

The present paper is a case study of the U.S. Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) series: “The Italian Americans” (2015). It is argued that the series’ authors have aimed to deconstruct the anti-Italian stereotype, widespread in the United States. In exchange, they have proposed a new, positive image of the Italian community in America promoting the accomplishments of its prominent members. The entire PBS project, “The American Experience”, reflects an evolution of U.S. identity patterns from the homogeneous “melting pot” toward the diverse “salad bowl”, and hence – from monologue to polylogue.

This article examines the autobiographical quotations of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra that are corroborated directly and indirectly by both old and newly discovered documents which contain references to the writer and his relatives. It is worth bearing in mind that some of that evidence was for long ignored, or allowed to fade into oblivion, or, sometimes, misinterpreted. Even some 20th-century scholars acclaimed for their richly documented biographies of the author of Don Quixote, appear not to have taken account of that resource, while insisting that there are still many unsolved enigmas in Cervantes' life. Undoubtedly, his life, like that of any genius, continues to exert an irresistible fascination even though its exploration is fraught with countless hazards, not least because of the complex interrelationships between his own texts and all kinds of documentary evidence supplied by historical research. The latter, the article claims, constitutes not only an invaluable treasure for any pursuit of the truth about Cervantes but also a solid base for a comprehensive account of his life and work.

The aim of this article is an attempt to analyse the world-famous documentary film entitled The Parade (Polish title Defilada). The film has a unique narrative structure, as it belongs to the performing arts, and makes use of hyperbole which represents one of rhetorical tropes. Thus, the narration of the film is characterised by a specific rhetorical order which follows the rules of composing a text about art, culture and other phenomena. The result is often art itself. At the level of creative intention, Andrzej Fidyks’s films constitute spectacles which have to be appealing enough to attract the attention of a contemporary viewer. Thus, spectacularity of this film is not only a feature directly related to audiovisual art. It constitutes an aesthetic value as well, and the spectacle appears as a parade in honour of the country’s leader. Research methods include two types of text analysis, i.e. the rhetorical analysis, and the analysis based on film studies. The neo-rhetorical (i.e., argumentative) approach to the cinematographic text is visible in studying The Parade as a documentary which was created under conditions of full control over the director, together with lack of access to information. Perversity is a deliberate argumentative strategy, as Fidyk uses it in order to explain to the viewers the reality of the visited country.

The book The Secondhand Time completes the artistic-documentary cycle of works The Voices of Utopia by S. Aleksievich, a Russian-speaking Belarusian author. Like her other books, it actualizes, in her own words, “the genre of human voices, confessions, testimonies and documents of a human soul”. Unlike Western documentary writers whose works oppose the artistic world by undressing and desacralizing it, S. Aleksievich, by following the traditions of the Russian literature, strives to preserve the sacred in her material, oftentimes introducing the artistic and esthetic elements. The article analyzes the tools that the author uses in her book, such as selecning facts and documents, alternating “voices”, editing them, including other sources in the text, moving from location to locatoin, explicit and implicit depiction of conscience, psychology of interlocutors, accentuating basic elements in monologues and remarks, allusions, reminiscences, etc. The conclusion evaluates artistic value of this work.

This article deals with the ekphrastic text/image (photography) relationships in Eli, Eli, Wojciech Tochman and Grzegorz Wełnicki's 2013 reportage from the slums of the Philippine capital Manila. The photos and the ekphrastic texts form a compact whole intended to produce the effect of unvarnished truth. It is this quality, the insistence on bearing witness to the truth, no matter how shocking, that determines the genre of Eli, Eli. The counterpointal arrangement of the images and the accompanying texts open the possibility of aesthetic and ethical discord between the testimony of the photographer and that of the reporter. However, in the end such tensions reinforce and validate the truthfulness of their report. This article discusses the strategy and the techniques deployed by the authors of Eli, Eli to establish a foolproof authenticity of their work.