In post-humanist studies of identity, otherness and exclusion – conducted within the de-anthropocentrism of the humanities – questions arise about the condition of non-human subjects (animals, plants, things) that gain the cultural and social status of Others. As non-human entities, they have a socializing value, cement interpersonal relations, attract people to certain places. They have performative, integrative and co-creating abilities. The posthumanistic “turn towards things” opens the room for the construction of their social (auto) biographies, a development which already has been taking place in contemporary children’s literature. The problem of the creation of (auto)biographies of non-human subjects is presented in this article on the example of the picture book Otto: The Autobiography of a Teddy Bear by Tomi Ungerer. The artist gives the non-anthropomorphized plush toy the status of a non-human subject and an active actor of social life as a medium of unoffi cial memory of the Holocaust. Ungerer consciously and innovatively uses the key determinants of the posthuman discourse, including intimate childhood experiences.

The concept of city has got broad analytical perspectives, one of them are: the structural perspective, sociological, psychological, political, cultural, industrial and also the pedagogical perspective. In opposition to the concept of city is the concept of countryside, within which the concept of nature is regarded as an idyllic place, it is the place of childhood, the place of longing, it is the lost place that has been starting to go under the knife of time since the 20s of the last century. The apotheosis of the concept of city, that is being practiced by many artists, embracing the symbolics of the concept of city by mass culture and later by popular culture, causes the necessity to take the initiative of conducting the research that would attempt to establish the identity of the concept of city in modern culture. The article attempts to specify how the concept of city functions in popular culture through the analysis of chosen texts in popular music, starting from the 50s of the XX century until the XXI century.

In this article I try to think about the terms “stories” and “ontologies” in Ewa Domańska’s works: Mikrohistorie. Spotkania w międzyświatach (1999; 2005), Historie niekonwencjonalne (2006), Historia egzystencjonalna (2012), Historia ratownicza (2014) and I try to compare my conclusions with her latest publication. I am interested in the turning point in her thoughts, giving up the theory and methodology of history and switching to the ontology of the dead body. In order to do this I look through these publications and indicate which threads could help work out the excellent, innovative, and fresh conception of Nekros. The main part of the article is a detailed discussion of this. In the other part, I consider how to interpret more traditionally a past description like “cultural memory” and whether Domańska’s works accidentally invalidate them. I suggest a short statement of Marcin Napiórkowski’s and Stephen Marks’ works to show closer (Marks) and further (Napiórkowski) parallels or completely different presentations of similar problems.

In his lecture on Adam Asnyk’s poetry delivered in 1896 Jan Kasprowicz came up with the term endymionism to refer to a relatively small portion of the poet’s work characterized by a tone of extravagant egotism and narcissism. Exemplary for this extravaganza was, according to Kasprowicz, the poem ‘Endymion’. It belongs to a sequence of poems voicing the poet’s trauma after the suppression of the 1863–1864 January Uprising, and is closely connected with the ‘A Dream of the Tombs’, his most opaque and depressive poem. In the Polish literary tradition – from Słowacki’s calling Krasiński the Endymion of poetry, through Norwid and Faleński to a number of Young Poland’s poets (Rydel, Wyspiański, and Lange to mention but a few) – the figure of Endymion marked a situation of the poet being misunderstood or flouted by critics and readers. But with Asnyk’s ‘Endymion’, who, despite the appearance of a lonely dreamer is in fact a guardian of the tombs of heroes who fell in an unequal fight, this mythological figure acquired a new meaning. It became a symbol of loyalty and a noble idealism making no concessions to mundane pragmatism. In the following decades endymionism of that kind would often blend into Parnassianism, a poetic movement committed to the idea of art independent of all practical concerns and obligations.

Artykuł podejmuje problem pamięci zbiorowej o czasach II wojny światowej wśród mieszkańców śląskiej wsi Bojszowy. Odwołując się do koncepcji traumy kulturowej Jeffreya C. Alexandra zadano pytanie: czy w przypadku pamięci mieszkańców badanej wsi o czasach wojny mamy do czynienia z wystąpieniem traumy kulturowej? Do analizy wybrano dwa problemy: pamięć o służbie mężczyzn w Wehrmachcie oraz pamięć o sąsiedztwie nazistowskiego obozu zagłady w Auschwitz-Birkenau (wieś znajduje się w bezpośrednim sąsiedztwie Oświęcimia). Odpowiedź na pytanie badawcze uzyskano dzięki analizie trzydziestu relacji zebranych techniką wywiadu pogłębionego. Badanie odtworzonych treści pamięci zbiorowej pokazało, że pamięć o służbie bojszowian w Wehrmachcie ma charakter traumy kulturowej. Pamięć o tych dramatycznych doświadczeniach przetworzona została na narrację, która odmieniła tożsamość mieszkańców wsi. Taki proces nie zaszedł w przypadku pamięci o obozie Zagłady, dlatego równie trudnych wydarzeń związanych z tym sąsiedztwem nie można ujmować w kategoriach traumy kulturowej.

Created in the distant past, attitudes and patterns of thinking have caused the mentality of contemporary Poles. The collective memory about the greatness delusions of old-time nobilities and the traumas suffered in the annexed territories today infl uence their thinking and behaviours as well national self-evaluation.

Architecture created in Poland of 21st C. is somewhere a mode of selfpresentation, in another cases is a method of shouting down the others. It is also aomwhere talking without any thesis, instead with a large dose of a badly understood assertiveness. Whe should to built a clear architectural activity, more objectified, and tied with a contemporaneity. We should begin from the most basic rules, from the certain architectural grammar. The identity can be understood as a set of features, which e.g. let to distinguish architecture growing out in Poland, in contrary to architecture rooted somewhere elsewhere. Those are not always any formal features. In order to understand what a spirit of the place really is, e.g. in ancient Rome there was an idea of the watchman spirit. This spirit gives life to the people and to the places, accompany them since they a born until they are dead. It determines their character or the content.