Andrzej Stasiuk’s collection of short stories Grochów (2012) is a sentimental reminiscence of the author’s childhood and youth. Stasiuk recalls events from the past: happiness and ease are replaced by pain, loneliness, sickness and death. The author of the article explains how the feeling of emptiness and loss is created by the writer, for whom the idea of loss is the main theme of the book. The aim of the text is to interpret Grochów, according to the category of
In his short novel Bruges-la-Morte Georges Rodenbach presents an inconsolable widower, Hugues Viane, who tries to immortalise his dead wife by the worship of her souvenirs and installing himself in Bruges, a “dead town”. The aim of the study is to examine how the absence changes into presence. Firstly, the Dead returns in Hugues Viane’s mind, the spouse appears in multiple portraits the widower contemplates every day and especially in the cult of her hair. Then, she reveals herself also in the history and the actual state of Bruges. Finally, the dead woman returns in her “double” – Jane Scott, a theatre dancer, who becomes for Hugues Viane his wife risen from the dead, unfortunately only for a while. Georges Rodenbach chooses absence as the main aspect of his novel but he joins it to all kind of attempts, especially related to the fantastique, to transform it into presence.
In his book Rzeczy, których nie wyrzuciłem [Things I Didn’t Throw Out] Marcin Wicha, in a gesture of filial mourning, tries to reconstruct the portrait of hisdeceased mother by writing about the objects she has left. Starting from the material, he recreates the behaviours, views, and family memories of his mother, and saves from the oblivion the scenes that most fully reflect her complexity. Wicha’s book is also an expression of rebellion against the ready word formulas used in the face of death as it attempts to create a story that matches only one deceased person. Rzeczy, których nie wyrzuciłem corresponds with other “mourning texts” (works by Różewicz, Iwasiów, Barthes and Zagajewski) but thanks to the author’s skillful oscillation between individual life and general truths, pathos and irony, understatements and exposures, the personal and the literary – the book turns out to be an original example of writing about loss as it avoids banality and sentimentality.
This paper looks at mourning and melancholia, and their ethical implications through the work of Sigmund Freud and mostly Jacques Derrida. The attempt here is to read through Derrida’s auto thanatological oeuvre through questions of fidelity, interminability, impossibility and ethics. In our perpetual struggle as scholars dealing with questions of meaning, existence, loss, life and death this paper tries to navigate the discursive traditions of looking at mourning and melancholia and what their radical potential is or can be where the mourning; melancholic; haunted; living subjects bear an impossible task unto the dead.
At a time when there is still the effects of the global economic crisis, many companies on the brink of bankruptcy. Many businesses deferred fulfillment of its obligations, paying bills and working on the debt. The emergence of insolvency raises additional cost (penalty payment to suppliers, increased interest on loans outstanding in the period and others), reducing corporate income, resulting from increased costs associated with overcoming the subsequent insolvency (obtaining additional financial resources), or. forced liquidation of the company. It also finds many businesses and entrepreneurs, who does not remit contributions for its employees do not pay them their wages and other demands. Progressive business indebtedness may result in failure of the company. Every employer must pay, however, guarantee insurance in the event of insolvency. Therefore, the employee is protected from the condition that the employer failed to pay him for his work when it becomes insolvent, so when it comes to disposing of the company. This includes not only employees working in Slovakia, but also in all European Union Member States. They are obliged to comply with the directives issued by the European Union to regulate all matters relating to employer insolvency.
This article contains reflections on the most important themes of Justyna Bargielska’s lyrics: death, mortality and loss. The peculiar compulsion of creating poems centered around thanatologic motifs stems from the poet’s biographic experience, and her lyrics very often constitutes an expression, subversive and iconoclastic, of the female experiencing mourning. Poetry turns out to be a value contrasted with death, but its effect facilitating reconciliation with the inevitability of the end has a dimension fragmentary, conditional and limited in time, which forces us to take further efforts towards the consciously taken job of “creating against death”.
According to the Glossed Judgment art. 433 does not comprise the situation when a room is overflowed by water leaking through the ceiling from another room situated above. The judgment says that in such a situation a perpetrator is liable on general basis which means that the aggrieved person has to prove negligence. The authors do not agree with the Judgment arguing that the Supreme Court's argumentation is based on the historical interpretation of the ancient Roman actio de effusis et deiectis which is no longer up to date with modern circumstances when most flats are furnished with running water and sewer systems. According to the authors the art. 433 of the Civil Code, when interpreted according to the Supreme Court’s Judgment, loses its significance.
The article is devoted to determining the specifics of war injuries among people of various ages living in the deoccupied Kyiv and Kharkiv regions of Ukraine. The purpose of the research is to determine the residents’ traumatic experience in the de-occupied territories of Ukraine caused by the Russian-Ukrainian war. The direct effects of PTSD concern intimate relationships such as marriage, social interactions, decreased productivity, and decreased resilience. This study shows that PTSD symptoms are more common for respondents over fifty years of age, who have deficit of social resources. It has been proven that the severity of PTSD symptoms in the residents of the de-occupied Kharkiv region is statistically significantly lower than the symptoms of the residents of the de-occupied Kyiv region, which is due to the longer occupation and more pronounced joy from liberation. Therefore, the appearance of PTSD symptoms in a more delayed period is likely.
Reading Olga Kirsch’s Afrikaans poetry, one is struck by the important role that the experience of loss occupies in her oeuvre. It is evident in the first two volumes of poetry she published while still living in South Africa, as well as in the five volumes she published after emigrating to Israel in 1948. Because her poetry, especially the volumes written in Israel, exudes an air of melancholy, this article uses Freud’s writings on loss, mourning and melancholia, as well as the historical tradition preceding his work, as a guideline in exploring the way in which the experience of loss, mourning and melancholy is portrayed in Kirsch’s oeuvre. The article focusses on the way in which loss is portrayed in her poetry: her sense that the Jewish experience of loss over the centuries forms part of her history and identity, the way in which she experiences the loss of South Africa and the language Afrikaans in which she is best able to express herself poetically when she emigrates to Israel, the way in which the loss of her father and mother at different times in her life affected her, her feeling that her experience of loss and the ensuing melancholy are carried over to her children.
This paper deals with issues of unemployment on the phenomenological and conceptual levels, in terms of the chain of relations ‘bread – work – employment’. It includes an elementary survey of approaches and works dealing with the phenomenon of unemployment in the last twenty years in the Czech Republic. The paper describes historical and current data, the differences in the position of men and women on the labour market, and the function of this position in terms of social (gender) roles. On this basis the paper establishes the hypothesis that job loss and unemployment cause greater stress to men than to women. The purpose of the study is to prepare a conceptual framework for empirical research which will verify this hypothesis.
The paper aims at analysing the question of melancholy and memory in contemporary Hindi literature. The author selected works by two Hindi writers (T. Grover and U. Vajpeyi), who represent similar approach towards literature and use similar means of expression. The two main motifs characteristic for their writing – love (pyār) and loss (a-bhāv) – are closely related to the creative process: the loved one is the lost object, the one subjugated to melancholy, who can be remembered through writing. In the light of A. Świeściak’s idea of “melancholic subject” and S. Bahun’s concept of “performing melancholia”, the author discusses ways in which both the writers construct their literary world, inhabit it with loved/absent objects (beloved, father), and mourn their loss. The subject in their writing is both fictional and biographical, so the loss relates to literary as well as real events, becomes multidimensional. In Grover’s Blue, the subject’s separation with the beloved leads her to realise the loss of her father in childhood, and thus unveils the mourning and melancholy (symbolically represented by blue/Blue). U. Vajpeyi’s poems create a space for meeting his lost love, for weeping and remembrance, for exchanging letters (and writing). The results of the present study show that melancholy – as a consequence of loss, mourning, and remembering - becomes a creative force, inducing the author (narrator, subject) to write.
The purpose of the paper is to discuss the sources and results of melancholy in Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye with reference to Dominick LaCapra’s theory based on a distinction between loss and absence. LaCapra claims that the former concept refers to a particular event, while the latter cannot be identified with any specific point in time or object. What is more, LaCapra admits that absence may result in melancholy, i.e. the state in which the individual remains possessed by a negative emotion because there is no possibility of working it through. The idea of absence causing melancholy is exemplified by the protagonist of The Bluest Eye, Pecola Breedlove. The girl dreams about acquiring blue eyes that belong to the prevailing white model of beauty which excludes African-American features. The feeling of absence is intensified by the U.S. education system aimed at promoting the lifestyle and characteristics of white Americans, her own mother who prefers serving white people to taking care of her own children, and the peers that constantly stigmatize Pecola for ugliness. Consequently, she becomes obsessed with the unattainable blue eyes. Since there is no chance for her to be accepted and thus cope with the absence of white features, the girl suffers from melancholy which leads her to insanity and exclusion from society.
The purpose of this article is to show how Marcel Proust faces temporality and how we can establish a parallel between his moods and the melancholic state of mind. A brief reflection is made on our relationship with time and about melancholy as consequence of our awareness of the passage of time. Focusing on the study of the first chapter of Swann’s Way, the first volume of Proust’s work In Search of Lost Time, it is presented as part of Proust’s melancholic experience, the fact that he articulated different times with the recourse of involuntary memory, one of the main means used by him in the writing of this work. The question of intuitions as thrusters of this same involuntary memory is addressed and as Proust, neither offering us a figurative literature, nor an abstract literature, used this formula in the struggle against his melancholic hopelessness. It is specified how Proust made the image (figure) to appear alternating the sensation of present with the sensation of past. Some considerations are made about mourning from two different standpoints, firstly from Walter Benjamin’s point of view and his philosophical perspective on the phenomenon of melancholy, then from the approach of Sigmund Freud, to whom melancholy is a pathology within the scope of psychiatry, opposed to mourning. The “loss” prevails throughout this reflection as a condition for the melancholic disposition.
With reference to the feature articles of a Bosnian prose-writer, Aleksander Hemon, the authoress depicts active, yet not sentimental, creative potential of nostalgia that is directed towards the future (and not the past). Hemon’s voice in the matter is turned against the actual state of affairs i.e. the reality of divided Bosnia and Herzegovina. However, the traditional values, once present in Yugoslavia, can ensure a better future for the novelist’s homeland. These values pertain to the community, which facilitates mutual exchange of thoughts and ensures the sense of belonging to a heterogeneous community, as well as hope, which is based on the belief that the future is in the hands of the community and that tomorrow can be better than today.
PL
Autorka, opierając się na felietonach bośniackiego prozaika Aleksandra Hemona, wskazuje na aktywny, daleki od sentymentalizmu, kreatywny potencjał nostalgii, który nakierowany jest na przyszłość (a nie przeszłość). Zaangażowanie Hemona skierowane jest przeciw stanowi faktycznemu – rzeczywistości podzielonej Bośni i Hercegowiny, zaś gwarantem lepszej przyszłości ojczyzny pisarza są wartości obecne niegdyś w Jugosławii: wspólnota (umożliwiająca wymianę myśli i implikująca poczucie bycia częścią niejednorodnej zbiorowości) oraz nadzieja (związana z wiarą, że los jest w rękach jej mieszkańców, a jutro może być lepsze niż dziś).
The following text is a translation of fragment of Jonathan Flatley’s book Affective Mapping Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism. The suprising claim of Affective Mapping is that dwelling on loss and melancholia is not necessarily depressing. Flatley argues that melancholy can lead people and writers to productively re-map their relationship to the world. Modernism is an accurate portrait of these processes and related consequences.
PL
Poniższy tekst jest tłumaczeniem fragmentu książki Jonathana Flatley’a Affective Mapping Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism. Zaskakujące twierdzenie, na którym autor opiera swój wywód, dotyczy melancholii i związanej z nią utraty. Okazuje się bowiem, iż nie wszystkie melancholie są przygnębiające. Obrazując szlaki modernizacji, Flatley wskazuje na rolę i znaczenie utraty, która nie tylko miała wpływ, ale często kreśliła twórczą mapę pisarzy oraz wyznaczała tor zachodzących zmian społeczno-kulturowych.
The claim here is that cultural representations of dementia may benefit from the structure of crime fiction which appears therefore to be among the theme most suited genres. We do not know enough about the disease or its etiology (the “culprit” remains unknown), hence the situation of the sufferer befits that of enigma or suspense, fear or confusion, doubt and presumption, standardly deployed by detective stories. Crime fiction narratives underscore that which is at stake in dementia: the riddle of disappearing of the person affected, the puzzle of memory loss, the identity doubt which extends to the relative when he or she is not recognized by the sufferer. By turning to a detective genre, Alzheimer’s novel profits from the genre’s growing popularity, owing to the reading public’s demand for challenges enhancing “mind reading” competences and training predictive abilities. The latter are more in demand as neurocognitive standards of readers grow.
Diaspora is a term often used today to describe practically any population which is considered “deterritorialised” or “translational” – that is, which has originated in a land other than which it currently resides, and whose social, economic, and political networks cross the borders of nation states or span the globe. However the connotation of “diaspora” goes back in time and is a concept that referred almost exclusively to the experiences of the Jews, invoking their traumatic exile from an historical homeland and dispersal through many lands. The connotation of a “diaspora” situation was thus negative as they were associated with forced displacement, victimisation, alienation and loss. Along with this archetype went a dream of return. Nonetheless, not all forced migration suffered in loss and despair. This paper explores the new age concept of “diaspora consciousness” that according to James Clifford lives loss and hope as a defining tension in Arnold Zable’s "Café Scheherazade". The paper aims to portray the interplay of loss and hope in the lives of Jewish war stricken asylum seekers who, having migrated to Melbourne, a city alien to them, suffer both a longing for the past and a flickering hope of survival within the Jewish diaspora community, preserving the language and culture of their lot. The constant tussle between assimilating oneself within the foreign culture and feelings of displacement and haunting memories of the past that refrained one from absorption and acculturation is foregrounded in the research.
The paper explains the specifics of the dynamics of the coping process of families with children with severe multiple disability (SMD). The realised study was of a qualitative design and was based on the thematic analysis and interpretative content analysis of case studies of families with a child with SMD. Data were collected using 11 semi-structured interviews and case studies of families. Among the analysed themes were hearing the first news of the diagnosis, making the decision to keep the child at home, the losses related to the disability of the child, general thoughts about the life experience and worries related to future. Data was interpreted on the basis of the model of loss created by Ross and discussed in the context of other models. Specific conclusions were found mainly in the dealing process with the first news of the child’s diagnosis, the decision process to keep the child with the family, indefiniteness of the disability and integration of the losses.
PL
Artykuł wyjaśnia specyfikę dynamiki procesu radzenia sobie w rodzinach z dziećmi z poważnymi niepełnosprawnościami (SMD). Przeprowadzone badanie było projektem jakościowym opartym na analizie tematycznej i interpretacyjnej analizie treści przypadków badawczych rodzin z dziećmi z SMD. Dane zebrano na podstawie 11 częściowo ustrukturalizowanych wywiadów i przypadków badawczych rodzin. Analizowane tematy obejmują: pierwsze wiadomości o diagnozie, podjęcie decyzji o zatrzymaniu dziecka w domu, straty związane z niepełnosprawnością dziecka, ogólne przemyślenia na temat doświadczenia życiowego i obaw dotyczących przyszłości. Dane zinterpretowano na bazie modelu straty utworzonego przez Ross’a i omówiono je w kontekście innych modeli. Konkretne wnioski wyciągnięto głównie w oparciu o proces radzenia sobie z pierwszą wiadomością o diagnozie, proces podejmowania decyzji o zatrzymaniu dziecka w rodzinie, nieokreśloność niepełnosprawności oraz integrację strat.
A model of the economic appraisal of flood protection projects using the NPV indicator is presented with a recent enlargements concerning economic valuation of casualties and psychological losses in victims’ well-being. This year’s series of big floods in Poland has made this topic come back to public attention.
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