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Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture, No. 10 (2020)
Dorota Filipczak
Issue 10 (2020), entitled "Literature Goes Pop" and edited by the journal's editor-in-chief, Dorota Filipczak, revolves around the encounters between literary intertexts/conventions/genres and the visual/digital modes. Although the volume opens with a critical essay on Pamela Sue Anderson's philosophy, the next sixteen scholarly texts explore a wide range of topics demonstrating close ties between literature and widely understood pop culture: film, music videos, the blogosphere, biographies of iconic poets, the realm of cyberpunk, video games, and even memes, as demonstrated by the article on online humor responding to the global crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The next section, playfully named "Literar(t)y Matters," deals with the following subjects: sensorial aesthetics in modernist fiction, Hart Crane's and Yvor Winters's interactions with Emily Dickinson's poetic legacy, the cosmic sublime in Tracy K. Smith's Life on Mars, the depiction of racial issues in contemporary US in Claudia Rankine's Citizen. An American Lyric, the portrayal of 19th-century America in Frances Wright's works, Wallace Stevens's ties to philosophy, a morphogenetic perspective on intertextuality, Thomas William Robertson's well-made plays, and wartime propaganda and gender in Ahmad Mahmoud's The Scorched Earth.
Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture, No. 11 (2021)
Liam Gearon
The main section of issue 11 (2021), edited by Liam Gearon, deals with the entangled relationship between literature, security, and intelligence. Like other forms of media, books have been used as part of the ideological and intelligence apparatus; authors have been perceived as a physical or ideological threat by dictatorial regimes and targeted alongside intellectuals, to be undermined or even eliminated. While propaganda itself can be considered a weapon of war, books and bombshells often share the same ideological trajectory, particularly during times of war: the cultural always forms a backdrop to conflict. This volume of Text Matters offers a broad treatment of various alignments between the notions of security and cultural production. The subjects addressed include the figure of the spy and themes related to espionage, e.g. in the works of Ciaran Carson; political, cultural and religious destabilizations in (post)Troubles-era Northern Ireland in the poetry of Paul Muldoon and the fiction of Anna Burns; populist and fictional notions of the migrant as "terrorist" in contemporary film and literature; shifting ideas of security in dystopian, post-apocalyptic narratives with a feminist twist (Mad Max: Fury Road); a psychology of security in a reinterpretation of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley novels. The remaining three sections, titled "Bodies, Traumas, Transgressions," "Pop Cultural Encounters," and "Literary Continuities" offer a broad array of subjects, ranging from the fictions of Margaret Atwood and Kurt Vonnegut to the sculptures of Kiki Smith and Shakesperean plays. The concluding part consists of four reviews (of Agnieszka Łowczanin's A Dark Transfusion: The Polish Literary Response to Early English Gothic: Anna Mostowska Reads Ann Radcliffe, Nolen Gertz's Nihilism, Don DeLillo's The Silence, and Natalie Crohn Schmitt's Performing Commedia dell'Arte, 1570-1630). The issue is dedicated to the memory of the journal's Founder, Dorota Filipczak (1963-2021).
Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture, No. 12 (2022)
Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet, Christian Arnsperger
Issue 12 (2022) of Text Matters, titled The Ecological Future, edited by Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet and Christian Arnsperger of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, deals with the temporal aspect of the ecological challenge facing humanity. Time is a central category in thinking about the environment because of our focus on the planet's possible futures as well as our awareness of how quickly the climate is changing and how fast we must react if we want to prevent a catastrophe. These issues are addressed by the volume's main section, containing scholarly papers, excerpts from two books by William deBuys, a fictional narrative by John Michael Greer, a screenplay by Elizabeth Watson, and conversations with the three authors. The scholarly articles discuss the work of writers such as J. G. Ballard, Imbolo Mbue, Cherie Dimaline, Louise Erdrich, Gary Snyder, Kenneth White, Richard Powers, and M. R. Carey, as well as graphic novels, photography, painting, and cultural practices. Their main points of focus are re-flected by the titles of the five sub-sections into which they have been divided: "Tempo-rality and Deep Time," "Eco-Anxiety and Anthropocene Nostalgia," "Indigenous Pasts, Presents and Futures," "Interconnectivity and Animacy," and "Ecotopia and Eco-Futurism." The ecological futures imagined in these interventions require creating new narratives of modernity, often, as it turns out, ones inspired by Indigenous attitudes to-wards the biosphere. As the ecological is often closely linked to different approaches towards the body, the subsequent section, titled "BODY/TEXT/IMAGE," contains pa-pers discussing several works of literature as well as visual and performing arts, sharing the theme of corporeality and embodiment. The volume is concluded by a review of a scholarly volume on Shakespeare and an interview with Philip Terry.
Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture, No. 13 (2023)
Małgorzata Myk, Mark Tardi
Issue 13 (2023), entitled "Literary and Visual Extremities" and edited by Małgorzata Myk and Mark Tardi, explores the notion of extremity in diverse types of artistic practice, from strictly literary to visual/performative. Eleven scholarly texts, collected in five subsections ("Extreme Borders," "Extreme Ecologies," "Limits," "Extreme Forms," and "Memory in Extremis") deal with the works by Lara Haddad, Divya Victor, Allison Cobb, Adam Dickinson, Jorie Graham, Clark Coolidge, Barbara Guest, Susan Howe, Emmett Williams, Roman Stańczak, Dennis Cooper, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Jordan Harrison. The volume continues with the "Artistic Collaborations" section, supervised by Justyna Stępień and Joanna Kosmalska. It consists of six articles that discuss Matthew Barney's Redoubt, Colum McCann's Apeirogon, Richard A. Carter's Waveform, the notion of multilingualism in Polish migrant theatre, and, finally, the Spirals artistic project. The next section, "Grief/Trauma/Social Unrest," centers on the portrayal of mourning in selected US-American TV series, grief memoirs, the depiction of toxic masculinity in Teddy Wayne's Loner, and representations of working-class communities in British cinema. The final section, "Continuities," examines literature concerned with the ecological future, Harry Styles's music videos, the notion of abjection in Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, and nation-building in India in the early 20th century, as demonstrated by the press from this period. Additionally, issue 13 contains two reviews: of Cormac McCarthy's The Passenger and Caroline Young's Crazy Old Ladies: The Story of Hag Horror.
Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture, No. 14 (2024)
Małgorzata Hołda, Ramsey Eric Ramsey
Issue 14 (2024) of Text Matters centers on the intertwined concepts of dwelling and belonging, exploring their complexities and dimensions within literature and culture. The editors, Małgorzata Hołda and Ramsey Eric Ramsey, introduce these themes as fundamental to the human experience of being-in-the-world, encompassing a vast array of human concerns and historical situatedness. The nineteen essays, grouped in five broad sections, examine topics as varied as disputes between Arendt and Heidegger, the intertwined nature of "belonging and longing" in the philosophies of Renaud Barbaras and Jean-Luc Marion, the intricate relationships between dwelling and identity, particularly within urban and environmentally stressed contexts, the retrieval of memories and the redefinition of personal identity in relation to urban space and altered surroundings, dwelling in urban and environmentally endangered areas, the entanglement of urban subjectivity with non-human elements, and seeking models of collective memory and dwelling that move beyond anthropocentric concepts. The main section also covers various modes of belonging, including the concept of home for digital objects and their interactions within online environments, regional identity in poetry, the experience of hate crime and reclaiming belonging, and the use of art and literature to analyze memory, absence, and socio-political critique. What follows is the "(More-Than-Human) Intersections, (More-Than-Generic) Liminalities" section that gathers seven scholarly texts discussing the representation of animal revolts in literature, transgression(s) in Sheri S. Tepper's The Gate to Women's Country, depiction of post-apartheid white identity in Die Antwoord's music videos, the horror elements in Robert Eggers's The Lighthouse, the ecocritical reading of Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders, the concepts of disnarration and denarration in Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, and innovation in the poetry by Charles Bernstein and Andrzej Sosnowski.
Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture, No. 2 (2012)
Dorota Filipczak
The theme of issue 2 (2012) is "Marginalia/Marginalities" explored across literature, theatre, film, and cultural theory. It opens with a conversation between Dorota Filipczak and film director Krzysztof Zanussi, addressing cultural exchange and the challenges faced by European cinema. The section "Marginal Matters in Theatre and Film" examines how actors and marginalized spaces have been historically portrayed. Its contributors discuss 18th-century biographies that reframe actors as cultural agents, Samuel Beckett's self-translation of Waiting for Godot, nature as a marginal force in Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line, and the rise of The Big Lebowski from cult obscurity to cultural significance. The authors in the "Margins in Fiction, Poetry and Literary Theory" section write about revisiting the Gothic genre, linking marginality to terror and the fantastic in fin de siecle fiction, Bruno Schulz's ex-libris art, J. H. Prynne's poetry, Edward Said's oeuvre, the Polish reception of Thomas Keneally, and the role of false quotations in Jim Crace's Arcadia. The final section, "Marginalized Identities," focuses on individuals in conflict with dominant cultural or social norms. Topics include Ira Daniel Aldridge's biography, gay masculinities in "Brokeback Mountain," female marginalization in dystopian fiction, and intercultural identity in works by Alice Walker, Louise Erdrich, Daniel Chacon, Michel Tournier, Monica Ali, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Aravind Adiga. The issue concludes with three reviews (of The Making of London: London in Contemporary Literature by Sebastian Groes; Simon Glendinning's Derrida; and Native Authenticity: Transnational Perspectives on Native American Literary Studies, edited by Deborah L. Madsen), as well as two interviews: between Fadia Faqir and Maria Assif, and Norman Ravvin and Krzysztof Majer.
Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture, No. 3 (2013)
Jadwiga Uchman
Issue 3 (2013) of Text Matters, entitled Eroticism and Its Discontents and edited by Professor Jadwiga Uchman (University of Lodz), is a collection of essays that concentrate on representations of eroticism in literature and film. The main section is divided into two subsections, the first of which, "Eroticism in Medieval and Renaissance Literature," consists of six scholarly texts. They discuss erotic imagery in the works of the anonymous Pearl Poet, William Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, Giovanni Boccaccio, Middle English mystical writers, and John Fletcher. The second one, "Eroticism in Modern Drama, Film and Prose," includes eight articles that approach the main theme of the volume in the oeuvre of such renowned authors as Samuel Beckett, Christina Reid, Sarah Daniels, Harold Pinter, and Salman Rushdie. They also explore the following notions: eroticism in urban drama, sexually explicit content in modern European cinema, and nudity in cinematic and stage adaptations of Shakespearean plays. Additionally, the volume continues the main subject of issue 2, "Marginalia/Marginalities," in the second part of an essay devoted to Ira Daniel Aldridge, the son of a famous 19th-century Shakespearean actor. The concluding section contains three reviews (of Writing as Resistance: Literature of Emancipation, edited by Jaydeep Sarangi; the fifth edition of J. A. Cuddon's A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, revised by M. A. R. Habib; and Czytanie Literatury [Reading Literature], a journal of the Institute of Polish Studies, University of Lodz) and two interviews (with Dan Rebellato and Rukmini Bhaya Nair).
Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture, No. 4 (2014)
Pamela Sue Anderson
Issue 4 (2014) of Text Matters, titled Re-visioning Ricoeur and Kristeva and edited by Pamela Sue Anderson (University of Oxford, UK), concerns new perspectives on the work of the two prominent philosophers. The scholarly articles tackle issues connected with sexuality, gender, religion, education, ethics, alterity, feminism, art, and literary genre, focusing on the themes of violence, loss, horror, vision, life, birth, recognition, imagination, and transformation. Ricoeur's thought is used for considering its practical implications for education and the possibility of dealing with sexual abuse, and as a critical tool for reading of Milton's Paradise Lost. Papers engaging with Kristeva's insights ponder her significance in recent critical debates, analyze her textual readings of the Hebrew Bible and her exhibition catalogue The Severed Head, and employ her theory for interpreting Doris Lessing's The Cleft as well as the nature of the Gothic genre. Both philosophers' thought is used to interpret Cormac McCarthy's The Road and the work of the Irish poet Sinead Morrissey, and reevaluated in terms of the importance of gender for Ricoeur's and Kristeva's work. Apart from the main section, the volume features a continuation of the main theme of issue 3, "Eroticism and Its Discontents," in an essay devoted to a folk song about King Peter I Lusignan from Cyprus, and a sub-section called "Irish Themes," analyzing the work of Sir Samuel Ferguson and W. B. Yeats. Finally, the volume contains a review of Christina M. Gschwandtner's book on God in contemporary philosophy, and interviews with Mieke Bal, Roddy Doyle, and Joanna Czechowska.