TRANSitions

The objective of this inaugural volume on Upper Silesia is to present an area of considerable cultural, historical, social and natural diversity from a transdisciplinary perspective. The common denominator of the works collected in this volume is the reflection on the multiple perspectives, identity, and diversity of this region. The legal, sociological, historical, cultural, geographic-economic, hydrological, climatological, and natural aspects of Upper Silesia from the past to the present are the focus of the works. The selection of texts has been curated to underscore the intricacies and contemporary relevance of the subject of Upper Silesia, thereby highlighting its originality. The present volume is the outcome of a comparative research project, in which researchers from various scientific disciplines discuss selected aspects of the diversity of Upper Silesia.

The contributions included in this volume address issues related to contemporary problems of publishing archival sources, legal aspects of access to archival sources created in the 20th century, electronic documents – their mass nature, peculiarities and gaps in the 20th century documentation, as well as sources serving to transfer values and knowledge between generations. The subject of the articles is the description of a wide spectrum of issues concerning the everyday lives of prominent individuals and the documentation thereof. It is imperative to acknowledge the foundational significance of this element in the context of civilisation’s evolution, the shaping of international relations, and the dynamics of geopolitics.

The volume traces etymologies, unpacks recipes, explores translation strategies, and analyzes food-related cultural narratives. Topics range from Italian cookbooks and Persian bread-making to Portuguese loanwords in French food terms, Polish adaptations of Chinese cuisine, the origins of pastrami, Steinbeck’s wartime food descriptions, and fasting during the English Reformation. Spanning disciplines and continents, the contributions offer a rich exploration of food’s cultural and linguistic significance. As food studies continues to expand into new territories – interweaving linguistic, digital, and cultural approaches – this volume contributes to the ongoing conversation about the role of food in shaping our past, understanding our present, and influencing our future.

Although Dalmatia is not at the core of the contemporary imagination of the Habsburg Empire, which has recently been idealised in scholarship, it shares several similarities with the majority of the ex-Habsburg borderlands, one of which is its complex ethnic makeup in the period of politicisation of a modern nationalist agenda (1890–1941). In this volume, the author deals with the most important Croatian, Italian and Serbian discourses that shaped the space and defined the heritage of Dalmatia. They organised spatial knowledge by bringing about competing mental maps which envisaged Dalmatia in national or regional terms. The book, focusing on prominent writers and societal actors, could also be seen as a contribution to intellectual history or the history of ideas on these Dalmatian borderlands.

The fundamental assumption behind the volume is that the current civilizational crisis, manifested in such phenomena as climate change, environmental catastrophes, pandemics and wars, puts into question the biopolitical means of optimizing the life of populations and individuals. To narrow down the thematic concerns of the volume, the chapters are centered around the notion of body, fundamental for the majority of theoretical takes on biopolitics. The volume shows that in the current age of catastrophes bodies are not only shaped and individualized through procedures of institutionalized discipline, but by an entanglement of environmental and planetary factors, typically omitted in extant accounts of biopolitics. The chapters go beyond biopolitics, because they show bodies as sites of operation of non-human or more-than-human agencies that work on scales inaccessible to human sensorium.

Literature and its interactions with other disciplines such as history, philosophy, anthropology, the visual and multimedia arts, social sciences, medicine, technologies, are at the core of many potential and multifaceted investigations, originating within literary discourse itself. Through these multifarious multidisciplinary approaches, literature can be seen as a complex and dynamic system, in which issues of cross-cultural contact can be tackled from different theoretical and methodological points of view. This volume focuses on the philosophical and scientific debate on cultural contact by investigating the critical implications of these dynamics through multidisciplinary perspectives to literary studies, and bridging the gap between apparently divergent approaches.

Due to the diversity of perspectives and methodologies within the relative uniformity of the subject, this collection of papers offers a rich overview of the multidisciplinary research on Arabic literature. The book includes two thematic parts. The first of them pertains to studies on Arabic literature, more precisely, on historical chronicles concerning the First Crusade, one of al-Ğāḥiẓ’s Treatise and also Modern Egyptian, Moroccan and Omani literary production. The second section of the volume contains papers on Semitic languages: Modern Hebrew, Maltese, Classical, Modern Standard, Egyptian and Lebanese Arabic. The volume is devoted to Elżbieta Górska.

Le volume porte un titre dont le sens semble plus qu’explicite. Au centre de toutes les contributions, on trouve la problématique culinaire dans tous ses avatars et contextes. La cuisine que les auteurs du volume font passer par le filtre des mots appartenant majoritairement aux langues romanes y est étudiée à chaque fois de manière méthodique avec des approches diverses et, en fin de compte, complémentaires. Une telle complémentarité pas seulement thématique devient manifeste déjà au niveau de la structure du volume que forment les sept parties. Toutes groupées autour de la culture culinaire – où coexistent pacifiquement arts, vocabulaires, dictionnaires, mais aussi goûts, recettes, usages – elles proposent une perspective variée.

The contributors attempt to describe Polish rivers and lakes as a nexus of narratives about nature culture, pointing out those elements of the story around which scientific, political, media, social and ecological narratives are created. All of them influence the shape of reflection on the water ecosystem and its function in Polish education. The authors recreate old and contemporary Polish mythmaking narratives about Polish rivers and lakes and, by proposing a critical reading of them, try to develop new educational practices that would take into account the 21st century conditions related to the climate catastrophe. The context related to the crisis also opens up thinking about rivers to other categories (cooperation, solidarity, activism) than those that have been applicable in Polish education so far (national symbolism, utility).

The volume convenes English- and French-speaking Canadianists who share a broad reflection on issues of exclusion and inclusion in Canadian contexts. It is through historical, but also linguistic, cultural and literary perspectives that we can unveil and learn more about the particular instances of inclusion and exclusion. The volume offers a kaleidoscopic view of Canadian history, politics, literature, and culture. The collected essays provide a discussion on a number of contemporary Anglophone and Francophone literary works, the evaluation of Canadian language policy, the reflection upon the literary canon as well as challenges of literary translation in a bilingual country, the distinctness of Black Lives Matter Canada, and, last but not the least, the historical status of New France.

In Aristotle’s Poetics, the well-constructed turning point, peripeteia, makes a story by unfolding its tragic – or, more broadly, literary – potential. But neither narrative nor historical turning points occur in empty spaces. Given the power of the peripety for plot-making, this volume inquires about its agency in the shaping of specific regions. Narration matters, for the constitution of events and regions alike; space matters, as a key element for the construction of plots and their dynamics. The Baltic Sea region, with its rich literary and cultural traditions and multiple overlapping layers of historical ruptures, is a particularly fruitful area for exploring transformation processes from a narratological point of view.

Marta Tomczok presents all Polish postmodern novels about the Holocaust, starting with “The First Splendor” by Leopold Buczkowski and ending with “The Suspected Dybbuk” by Andrzej Bart. She also presents their rich relationships with selected foreign-language prose, which intensified especially at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. The culmination of the entire trend is a discussion around two novels: “Tworki” by Marek Bieńczyk and “Fly Trap Factory” by Andrzej Bart, which reveals the aestheticizing and post-memorial profile of Polish postmodernization and its advantage over the historiosophical trend. This monograph is not only the first such collection of post-Holocaust postmodern novels, but also the first comprehensive study of postmodernism in the literature about the Holocaust, which, thanks to comparative analysis, tries to analyze and explain the circumstances of the appearance and later disappearance of this trend from cultural landscape of the world and Poland.

The monograph is a presentation of the writings of the stateless people called Lemkos-Rusyns, from the earliest awareness of their own cultural and ethnic separateness until World War I. It contains information about the group and its culture, defines the concept of Lemko literature as a minority literature and describes the cultural situation of Lemkos in the 19th century. Ten chapters present the main genres and types of Lemko literature in the years 1848-1918. Literature is shown as one of the key cultural and identity discourses. Extensively quoted excerpts from texts reveal the linguistic reality and consciousness of the Lemko intelligentsia of the time. The monograph also outlines the developmental tendencies of Lemko literature over the successive stages of this community’s history.

These contributions offer fundamental insights into how literary works address and reconceptualize issues of nationalism, groupism, belonging and denationalization in selected European contexts. Various critical perspectives are employed here to highlight modern social and political processes as registered and, to a certain extent, also fashioned by contemporary literary discourses. ‘Reimagined communities’ emerge from literary redescriptions of existing or imaginary sociopolitical configurations in several European states or regions. All the contributions share a heightened sensitivity to the individual as enmeshed in oppressive geopolitical circumstances. Thereby, literary expressions of how individuality is constrained by social pressures may offer inspiring blueprints for emancipation.

One of the characteristic features of the linguistic situation of contemporary Iran is the coexistence of two standards of Modern Persian: the written and the spoken. While literature is generally composed in the written variety, the typically “spoken” forms are also to be found in the literary text. Modern spoken Persian in Contemporary Iranian Novels is a study of these. A scrutinous analysis of five carefully selected novels with methods drawing mostly from the register analysis seeks answers to questions such as: what features are characteristic to the spoken variety of language, how are they woven into the literary language, does the relationship between spoken and written registers change over time and how can this process affect the future development of Persian language?

This book illustrates that the idea of a ‘national’ literature is profoundly problematic. Chapters on boundaries and crisscrossing show how a nation and its writers’ works do not exist in isolation from their history. Stressing migration and (inter)cultural dialogue, authors explore how the characters in the texts establish a sense of belonging both within the context of migrations and within the context of Lithuania since its independence. The final series of essays in this book discusses Lithuanian literature abroad that is in translation.

In den Beiträgen des Bandes wird die Vielfalt von Sammlungsgefügen deutlich. Im Zentrum stehen Dokumente aus der Sammlung Varnhagen, die von bisher wenig beachteten Autorinnen stammen. Schriftstellerinnen wie Charlotte von Ahlefeldt, Helmina von Chézy, Amalie von Imhoff, Amalie Schoppe, Fanny Tarnow, Karoline von Woltmann, Caroline de la Motte Fouqué, Amalie von Voigt und andere taten sich durch eine breite und vielfältige Wirkung im literarischen Feld hervor; als Schriftstellerinnen, Übersetzerinnen, Journalistinnen, Pädagoginnen, etc. sowie als Vermittlerinnen zwischen Kulturen und Literaturen. Zu den archivierten Spuren dieser Tätigkeiten treten im Sammlungszusammenhang archivierende Spuren: Notizen, Dossiers, Vermerke. Diese poetologisch-ästhetischen, historischen und literaturgeschichtlichen Konstellationen werden durch digitale Editionen erschlossen und verknüpft, wobei sie ihrerseits diskursgestaltende Funktionen übernehmen.

Female authors from the Varnhagen Collection such as Charlotte von Ahlefeldt, Helmina von Chézy, Amalie von Imhoff, Amalie Schoppe, Fanny Tarnow, Karoline von Woltmann, Caroline de la Motte Fouqué, Amalie von Voigt, and others distinguished themselves in the literary field by their broad and varied impact – being writers, translators, journalists, educators and functioning as mediators between different cultures and literatures. The archived traces of these activities are intertwined and extended in the collection by traces of archiving activities: notes, dossiers, annotations. These constellations can be made accessible and interconnected through digital editions, whereby they in turn take on a discourse-shaping function. This as well as the diversity of collection assemblages is elaborated in the broad range of contributions of the volume.

Der Band ist ein Versuch, auf die Transformationsprozesse der europäischen Gesellschaften, die ab 1989 in Mittel- und Osteuropa stattgefunden haben, zurückzublicken und ihre literarischen, historischen und kulturellen Zeugnisse zu analysieren, die innerhalb von mehr als dreißig Jahren in ausgewählten postsozialistischen Ländern (Polen, Russland und Balkanländer) entstanden sind. Der Schwerpunkt dieses Bandes liegt auf Erzählweisen über Gesellschaften im Wandel, auf der kulturellen Symbolik dieser Zeit, auf der Darstellung des Weges zur Demokratisierung der Kultur, des öffentlichen Lebens und der Institutionen. Im Zentrum des Interesses stehen ebenfalls die Formen der Regionalisierung von Kulturen, der Emanzipation von Sprachen und kleineren Kulturen oder neu entstehende Identitätsdiskurse und ihr Einfluss auf Gesellschaften. Die Begriffe von Nation, Gemeinschaft und Erinnerung spielen dabei eine wichtige Rolle.

This volume is an attempt to look back at the transformation processes of European societies that took place in Central and Eastern Europe from 1989 onwards and to analyse their literary, historical and cultural testimonies that emerged within more than thirty years in selected post-socialist countries (Poland, Russia and Balkan countries). The focus of this volume is on narratives about societies in transition, on the cultural symbolism of this period, on the depiction of the path to democratisation of culture, public life and institutions. It also focuses on the forms of regionalisation of cultures, the emancipation of languages and smaller cultures, or emerging discourses of identity and their influence on post-transition societies. The categories of nation, community, memory play an important role.