The paper develops the implicit as well as explicit meaning which evokes Stanisław Lem’s concept of the Body and the Corporality portrayed in the novel Return from the Stars. Moreover, Lem’s novel about an astronaut Hal Bregg and his return on Earth is analysed. In this novel author uses the idea of Einstein’s twin paradox. Hal Bergg—the stereotype of masculinity—is confronted with decadent and egalitarian society, which may be refers to the reunion masculinity with femininity. Such storyline shows the multidimensionality of the issue of Corporality, and presents the Body as a epistemological metaphor of modernism and postmodernism. In addition, the Body is depicted in the Return of the Stars as a figure of a mask and a costume. Furthermore, the Body in Lem’s novel is also interpreted as part of the Universe—as the boundary between what is temporary and what is infinite and transcendent.

The aim of this paper is to discuss the composition of Johanna Sinisalo’s novel The Core of the Sun by demonstrating how the author used excerpts of academic text to create the literary world of the novel. As the theoretical foundation, I will use Lubomír Doležel’s research introducing the theory of possible worlds in literary creation. The realia, possibilia, and the transworld identity of the fictional world of Sinisalo’s novel is analyzed on the basis of excerpts from dictionary entries and scientific articles used as world-building elements.

This article analyzes the subconscious fears and anxieties connected with loneliness, low self-esteem, all kinds of frustrations, a sense of being trapped in a bizarre reality or being pushed to transgress (i.e. to cross the border between life and death, between the human and the animal, or getting exposed to new technologies or forms of religion) in Olga Tokarczuk's Opowiadania bizarne [ Bizarre Stories]. The resulting emotional volatility gives rise to questions about one own's identity and one's place in a world beyond control. At the same time the manifold fears and anxieties impose on one a Manichean, dualistic perception of an incurably weird (bizarre) reality. So in Opowiadania bizarne we are constantly reminded of man's arrogance in his relations with the earth's ecosystem, the destructive nature of his subconscious mind, the dangers of new technologies and the corrosive effects of postsecularism.

This is a critical reading of two Polish science-fiction novels of the post-Apocalypse subgenre, Cassandra’s Head by Marek Baraniecki and The Old Axolotl by Jacek Dukaj, with the help of concepts borrowed from the philosophical toolkit of Jacques Lacan. Each of the two books envisages an apocalyptic catastrophe and its consequences as well as the subsequent attempts to rebuild human civilization. The action in either novel is shaped by tensions between the Symbolic and the Real. The latter, though suppressed and shut out, keeps resurfacing, usually when it is least expected, leaving an indelible marks in the life of the survivors. An analysis of the handling of this conflict in the two novels offers a number of insights into the way these two fundamental modes (or, Lacanian orders) of human perception are integrated into the worlds of post-Apocalyptic fiction.