The above-presented analysis demonstrates that Edgar Allan Poe — just like numerous other writers — was not indifferent towards sport. Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Sport has a great power of influence. It permeates different spheres of life and constitutes an important segment of culture. It creates a fragment of the world of literature as well. Sport has always occupied an important place in American society. The nineteenth century laid the foundations as far as creation of American sports landscape is concerned.34 This was the time when Poe lived and worked. Paradoxically, the writer whose best work is mostly concerned with terror and sadness, quite often — especially in his youth — abandoned himself to a life of pleasure and sports. The research also touched the question of Poe’s legacy in contemporary world, which is not only visible in literary works or films, but also in the sports realm, namely at American football stadiums. Hopefully, the paper is an eye-opener showing that Edgar Allan Poe, “one of the most controversial figures in American literature” 35 had many faces, and exploring his complex personality and rich legacy lets one convince oneself that sport constitutes a part of them. Thanks to the recent rise of interest in sport among scholars in the humanities and social sciences, there has been a steady growth in the number of academic publications dealing with the subject of connections between literature and sport. Only selected aspects of this relation could be described in this article. Obviously, there is a need for further research as far as the presence of sport both in literature and in biographies of writers is concerned.
Można powiedzieć, że ułożony przez Grabińskiego program literacki metafantastyki to wypadkowa cech poetyki utworów Poego zwanych short stories. Z tego powodu autorka artykułu zestawiła ze sobą utwory obu pisarzy. Wybrane nowele – William Wilson Poego i Zez Grabińskiego – są reprezentacyjne dla fantastyki psychologicznej i dotykają problemu zaburzonej osobowości człowieka. Narracja prowadzona jest w sposób sprawozdawczy, a opisane wydarzenia mają z pozoru charakter realistyczny. Wspólny mianownik stanowi także motyw przewodni – sobowtór – który zajmie w tym opracowaniu szczególne miejsce.
EN
It could be said that Grabinski’s literary theory program of meta-fiction is the result of the characteristics of Poe's short stories. For this reason I decided to correlate the works of both writers. I selected two short stories which concern the problem of disordered personality – William Wilson by Edgar Allan Poe and Zez by Stefan Grabinski. I found them typical of the psychological fiction. Both of them have reporting narration and the plots are seemingly realistic. Another common feature is a doppelganger leitmotif, which has a special place in this paper.
Edgar Allan Poe’s eerie short story “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” is a particularly noteworthy example of the sublime, a psychological state in which one is overwhelmed by the magnitude of that which is perceived by the mind. Valdemar exemplifies the sublime in that his death has somehow been suspended in time because he was under hypnosis as part of a medical experiment at the moment of his passing. However, the story also draws particular attention to the means by which insight into the nature of death is acquired by the hypnotist who narrates the story. For a more comprehensive understanding of the sublime experience, one may turn to the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan and the postmodernist work of Slavoj Žižek, which lead to the conclusion that the dramatic chain of events in “Valdemar” is an example of the sliding signifier, and, moreover, that the instability of the signifier may explain the sublime effect.
Clarification is one of the textual phenomena enumerated by Antoine Berman as deforming tendencies in translation. It is best observable when the target text turns what was ambiguous in the original into more specific. This need to clarify the original often stems from systemic differences between languages. However, on numerous occasions the movement from the original ‘indefinite’ into the definite in the translation results from a subjective decision taken by the translator, who in fact has proper linguistic means at his disposal to retain the original level of indeterminacy. In the case of a literary work such a tendency may influence all its levels, especially the interpretative possibilities, as seen in two Polish translations of E.A. Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, by Bolesław Leśmian and Stanisław Wyrzykowski. By discussing descriptions of the fictional space and the references to the Usher siblings, this article indicates to what extent clarifying lexical choices impact on the atmosphere of the work, consistency of the fictional world, suspense and the stance of the narrator.
The article examines five Polish translations of the famous ballad The Raven written by Edgar Allan Poe. The translations come from different periods; the efforts by Przesmycki and Beaupre belong to the period of “Młoda Polska”, and date roughly from the tum of the nineteenth and twentieth century. The translation by Kasiński, although it was created a few decades later, still shows a clear influence of the specific aesthetics of the “Młoda Polska” movement. These three translations, in spite of numerous differences, form quite a uniform set, with the dominant underlying strategy of domestication, which manifests itself in “ennoblement” and “clarification”. By contrast, the two contemporary translations, by Barańczak and by Kozak, lack the stylistic homogeneity of their predecessors. They are also characterized by the various departures from the original, motivated by the different subjective approaches taken by each translator. None of the five examined Polish translations has attained the satisfactory degree of equivalence with respect to the original text.
This paper considers The Masque of the Red Death, a short story by E.A. Poe. Understanding the carnival as mundus inversus (temporary inversion of order) and using the theories proposed by M. Bakhtin or V. Turner, the authors present an interpretation according to which Poe’s ball is indeed an inversion of a ball – an anti-carnival. Furthermore, they do not agree with the allegorical understanding of Poe’s works. Indicating a suggestion made by Poe himself, they choose an interpretation related to Eliade’s concept of symbolism. They also disagree with the theory in which The Masque of the Red Death is the story about the non-existence of God. Referring to other religious interpretations and the problems of time, they present their own biblical conclusion.
Teatr Grand-Guignol od dawna uważany jest za pospolity gatunek niemający nic wspólnego z prawdziwą sztuką. Z pewnością repertuar tej „krwawej sceny” stanowi popularny odłam teatru bulwarowego. Producenci sensacji prześcigali się w ukazywaniu obrazów przemocy, by schlebiać gustom klasy średniej, żądnej krwi, widoku ludzkich szczątków, wydłubanych oczu, krzyku, rzężenia i innych „efektów specjalnych”. Niemniej pisarze związani z tą sceną stworzyli również nową estetykę, która inspiruje się dorobkiem takich autorów jak Guy de Maupassant i Edgar Allan Poe. Przyświecać im będzie wspólny cel: straszenie widzów, ale bardziej będą się koncentrować na psychologicznym wymiarze lęku niż na krwawych scenach przemocy. Nowi dramaturdzy odnajdują w swych genialnych poprzednikach nie tylko tematykę tajemniczości i grozy, ale także przeszczepią na grunt teatralny ich prozatorskie zabiegi formalne. Powstają więc sztuki zwięzłe w formie, w których napięcie ma prowadzić, zgodnie z klasycznymi regułami, do punktu kulminacyjnego i rozwiązania akcji. W niniejszym artykule przedstawione są poszukiwania pisarzy, którzy kładą podwaliny pod swoisty „teatr okrucieństwa”.
EN
The Grand-Guignol theater is regarded as a common literary genre having nothing in common with the real art. Certainly repertoire of this “bloody scene” was a popular fraction of the boulevard theater. The procurers of a sensation competed in showing images of violence to flatter the tastes of the middle class eager for blood, human remains, gouged out eyes, scream, wheezing and other “special effects”. Nevertheless, authors associated with this movement also created a new aesthetic which was inspired by the achievements of such classics as Guy de Maupassant and Edgar Allan Poe. They were focused on the common goal: to scare the audience. However, they were rather oriented on the psychological dimension of the fear than on the bloody scenes of violence. New playwrights have found in their brilliant predecessors not only a theme of mystery and horror but also have transplanted their prosaic formal measures on the theatrical ground. The dramas were created concise in the form in which the pressure was meant to lead, according to the classical rules, through the point of culmination up to the final solution. In this article the Author presents the quests of writers who have laid down the foundations of the characteristic “theater of cruelty”.
Summary The thesis analyses the role of senses in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Tell-Tale Heart. The narrator suffers from chronic squeamishness of senses – his most sensitive one is hearing. Thus, the text is full of descriptions of varied sounds. Sight is another important sense, which becomes protagonist’s main source of anxiety. An obsession about an old man’s eye leads him to commit a murder. The apprehension of the world by the protagonist is modeled by psyche of its character. As such, the analysis of his sensatory experiences has allowed to construct a picture of his internal life.
This text is a commentary on Katarzyna Bonda’s book “Typewriter: A Course in Creative Writing.” The well-known writer’s book is offered here as an example of an inspiring textbook of operational knowledge for literary criticism as an alternative to typical academic knowledge. These reflections ultimately lead to a definition of storytelling (the art of designing engaging narrative) and a proposal to conceive of this practice as a discipline within literary criticism that has tremendous pragmatic and creative potential.
PL
Tekst stanowi komentarz do książki Katarzyny Bondy Maszyna do pisania. Kurs kreatywnego pisania. Praca znanej pisarski jest tu przedstawiona jako przykład inspirującego podręcznika z zakresu literaturoznawczej wiedzy operacyjnej skonfrontowanej z typową wiedzą akademicką. Punktem dojścia rozważań jest definicja storytellingu (sztuka projektowania angażujących opowieści) oraz propozycja wyodrębnienia go jako dziedziny literaturoznawczej o bardzo praktycznym i twórczym potencjale.
JavaScript is turned off in your web browser. Turn it on to take full advantage of this site, then refresh the page.