In reference to Professor Barbara Bobrowska review, the text presents reasons why Bolesław Prus’s "W Warszawie. Wybór z 'Kronik'" adopted such form, and not another, and how this form results from general assumptions regarding activities to promote knowledge about "The Doll’s" creator and his work. The author’s position on what disseminating actions should be carried out to transmit knowledge on literature and culture from the second half of the nineteenth century to wider audience than before was also presented. The last section provides some comments on the defects of the "Kroniki" edition made by a team led by Professor Zygmunt Szweykowski.
The article begins with stating a fact that in Bolesław Prus’s "Kroniki" there are many fragments (especially those, in which black women occur), which sound so obscene that, according to contemporary standards, they could be considered pornographic. This lead to a conclusion that the conviction about an absolute prudery of the contemporary official circles and a current image of Bolesław Prus has to be modified. The next part of the article is devoted to an attempt to find the reasons why exactly this topic of African women provoked the author of "Kroniki" to come up with erotic fantasies (one of them was a belief in the moral inferiority of African inhabitants widespread in the 19th century), and also to more detailed analysis of the most characteristic fragments of "Kroniki" containing all these fantasies (embedding the image of women, created by its author, in the context of other colonial narratives).
The article presents the problems associated with managing digital humanities projects, as well as the issues of building and maintaining a team based on project funding, utilising the experiences of conducting digital projects in the years 2013–2018 by the team of the New Panorama of Polish Literature (NPLP), acting within the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Explored are the few advantages and numerous disadvantages of depending solely on grants when maintaining a team, referring to examples of completed and ongoing NPLP team projects. The article also highlights the problems encountered when working on those projects. The most important conclusion to be drawn from this analysis is that, although project funding can be used to begin the creation of a serious digital humanities project, maintaining it and securing stability for it is not possible without launching regular funding irrespective of the grants awarded.
The article analyses a comic book by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie in the context of numerous interviews given by the British author which relate to this book and also to the issues such as: comic book culture, Victorian culture, sexuality and its representations in various periods. Moore and Gebbie’s work is analysed mostly in three facets: 1. various forms of stories about loss and the state of losing depicted in the book (and signalised by one of the meanings of the title "Lost Girls"), and also about the narration of an attempt at self-recovery; 2. intertextual and graphic reference to the second half of the 19th century (related to literature, fine arts, and cultural phenomena); 3. the manner in which the comic book refers to pornography and meaning that Alan Moore ascribes to the term 'pornography'. All these facets combine into a narration about the ending of the 19th century, when the I World War becomes the moment of the loss of Imagination and of the transfer of culture under the power of Thanatos.
The article analyses the title text of culture, created by Naughty Dog studio. The most important topic is a personal trauma experienced by the main character, and caused by the loss of his daughter. This issue is directly related to the moral collapse that after a catastrophe affected the whole humanity. The key reference and literary inspiration for the work discussed is provided by "The road" of Cormac McCarthy, and especially by the most significant for this novel topic of morality in times after the disaster, and preservation of humanity in a post-apocalyptic world. In the presented interpretation also "The Last of Us" tells the story of redemption the sins of the “time of postapocalypse” by the hero and regaining faith in another human. The road of the main characters, as for a father and son from the American book, is principally directed toward a moral transformation: to understand that one should return to morality before the catastrophe, and establish relationships with other people based on cooperation, not brutal rivalry. The most important reason for the transformation of the main character is a relationship with a fourteen-year-girl, developing while wandering, which a final moment is to establish between them a father-daughter relationship, whereby the man can be liberated from the original trauma. An important issue raised in the text is to reflect on different levels of a player's extremely intense experience of the story being told, stemming from the overall specificity of the medium and a breakthrough construction of "The Last of Us".
The paper compares two main protagonists from "Lalka" [The Doll] by Bolesław Prus and from the series "Breaking Bad" by Vince Gilligan by indicating evident parallels between them. The figure of Walter White (which is in some way a summary of anti-hero trend in the contemporary series) is also used to present the protagonist of "Lalka" as a certain type of anty-hero and to emphasize debatable problems in his life. The protagonist of the American series becomes a reference point to such issues in Stanisław Wokulski’s biography as making fortune and spending it as well as the determination to achieve one’s goals. The events connected with commissions for Suzin are examined – Bulgarian and Paris episodes – which acquire new meanings, just like the relation between the Pole and the Russian.