Proust was not only a French writer, but - based on his incredible scientific knowledge and descriptions in his novel - to some extent, a neurologist and psychologist. Far ahead of his time, Proust illustrated in his masterpiece In Search of Lost Time a link between personal memories and sensory stimuli. In his novels, he explains the mechanism of memory retrieval after perceiving a sensation. Without a doubt the most famous scene of In Search of Lost Time remains the moment when the taste of a French pastry, called “madeleine,” rekindles the childhood memories of the narrator Marcel in the first volume Swann’s Way. Similarly, listening to Vinteuil’s Sonata triggers and maintains Swann’s love for Odette and its expression in the second volume of the masterpiece In Search of Lost Time. His descriptions reveal that human senses are not only linked to personal memories, but may also trigger them. Moreover, contemporary studies in the biological field have shown that there are correlations between stimuli and intangible feelings and states of mind, such as love, hatred, and sympathy, primarily located in the amygdala of the human brain. Reading Proust’s masterpiece In Search of Lost Time through the lens of current neurological studies opens an interesting and innovative perspective on the subject of memory retrieval and shows that he was not “only” a writer, but also an observational scientist.
For years little has been said the French public discourse about North and West African contribution to the World War II efforts, the sacrifice in blood of their soldiers was mentioned only rarely and occasionally. However, filmmakers embraced this topic unfamiliar to the public. Rachid Bouchareb – a French director of Algerian descent – is one of them. His film Indigènes (2006) is a tribute of sorts to the “forgotten heroes”, who have lost their lives fighting Germans in the south of France and later Alsace. By portraying four soldiers, the artist poses important questions regarding topics such as ethnicity, equality, discrimination, and racism, but also that of being forsaken, leaving an emptiness in the collective mind of a nation. The author describes the attitude of contemporary French filmmakers towards the postcolonial past and themes of ethnicity, concentrating on a film by Rachid Bouchareb. The picture seems to be especially relevant from the point of mutual relations between ethnicity, the politics and culture.
Artykuł prezentuje koncepcje pamięci w ramach nurtu Radykalnego Konstruktywizmu. W pierwszej części autor przedstawia charakterystykę tego nurtu i jego stosunek do klasycznych koncepcji poznania i wiedzy. Radykalny Konstruktywizm charakteryzowany jest jako nurt w filozofii nauki, który wywodzi zdolności poznawcze człowieka z jego biologicznej natury i autopojetycznej organizacji, co pozwala na uzasadnienie poglądu, iż system poznawczy człowieka jest systemem zamkniętym, wytwarzającym wiedzę o świecie w postaci modeli działań w środowisku. W drugiej części artykułu autor prezentuje konstruktywistyczne rozumienie pamięci jako fenomenu neurologicznego, świadomościowego i społecznego. Pamięć w porządku neurologicznym zawiera się w architekturze połączeń nerwowych, w porządku świadomościowym określa się ją jako zdolność elaboracji wspomnień i ich opracowywania w celu społecznej negocjacji. Pamięć społeczną zaś określają struktury interakcji jednostek, związanych ze sobą ponadindywidualnymi relacjami o charakterze systemowym.
EN
The article presents the concept of memory within the limits of Radical Constructivism. In the first part the author describes the characteristics of this approach and its attitude to the classical conceptions of cognition and knowledge. Radical Constructivism is viewed as a trend in philosophy of science which derives human cognitive abilities from his biological nature and autopoietic organisation, which justifies the view that human cognitive system is a closed system that shapes knowledge about the world in the form of action construct models of the natural world. In the second part the author discusses constructivist models of memory, understood as a neurological, consciousness, and social phenomenon. The memory seen from a neurological perspective is contained in the architecture of neural connections, as a matter of consciousness it is defined as an ability of memories elaborations and their arrangement for social negotiations, while social memory is explicated by structures of units interaction bound by supra-individual relations of systemic nature.
By means of an analysis of the tension between orality and literacy the following paper tries to discover how Plato understood the task of transmitting wisdom. Considering his vehement critique both of poetry and of writing, a sharper understanding of the nature of Platonic wisdom came about. Wisdom seems to be beyond all appearances and can be achieved only through dialogue within meaningful relationships.
The "Grodzka Gate – NN Theatre" Centre is a cultural institution based in Lublin. The projects implemented by the Centre draw upon the symbolic and historical meaning of its location: the Grodzka Gate, also known as the Jewish gate. In the past, the gate was a meeting place and a crossing point between the Christian and Jewish parts of the city. In 1939 Lublin had almost 120000 inhabitants, of whom approximately 43000 wereJewish. During World War II, the Jewish citizens were murdered by the Nazis, and the Jewish quarter was destroyed. Changes brought forth by the fall of communism in the year 1989 commenced the process of a collective restoration of memory by the Polish nation. Lublin was one of the cities that had to confront a past forgotten throughout the years. The founders of the "Grodzka Gate – NN Theatre" Centre, at the beginning of their work in the early 1990s, discovered that the vast empty space on one side of the Grodzka Gate contained memories of the Jewish part of the city and that without an understanding of these spaces neither could the history of Lublin be understood. For the Centre, itself a place of memory, the Grodzka Gate and the destroyed Jewish quarter have become a natural starting point for activities in the area of record-keeping, education and art.
The article presents how (and if) the displacement action of 1947 influenced the young generation of people of Lemko origin (called the grandsons of the Operation ‘Vistula’). The authors cite the statements of representatives of various Lemko identity options – Lemkos who grew up in families cultivating traditions and retaining the language, a half-Lemko whose one parent is of Lemko origin, but this is not a fact of importance to her identity, regained Lemkos whose parents are Lemkos, but they did not raise them in Lemko traditions and language, a Lemko who knows about her origins, intergenerational transmission has not been interrupted in her family, but this is not a dominant issue for her identity, and also a Carpatho-Rusyn activist whose family is not a victim of the Operation ‘Vistula’, but sees it as a community experience, important for the broadly understood Carpatho-Rusyn identity. On the basis of answers to the questions about how they learned about the Operation ‘Vistula’, what their parents or grandparents told them about it, do they feel that it had or still has an impact to their lives, the authors show that the complicated attitudes toward Lemko identity are the result of the Operation ‘Vistula’.
The aim of this article is to explore the most recent literary representations of the so-called “Revival process” in Bulgarian history or the renaming of the Bulgarian Muslim and Turkish minorities in the 1980s in Zlatko Enev’s Requiem for Nobody (Реквием за никого, 2011), Martin Marinov’s The Veil (Булото, 2014), Miroslav Penkov’s The Stork Mountain (Щъркелите и планината, 2016), and Liudmila Mindova’s Novel for the Name (Роман за името, 2017). The analysis focuses on the outlining of the thematic and structural similarities between the novels and the different approaches toward the depiction of trauma. I argue that this new trend is an attempt to rethink the legacy of the communist past and conceptualize collective trauma.
In this article, Ifocused my attention on the vision of aging and attitude towards this phenomenon which are present in Ćosic’s autobiographical prose. Based on texts, which were published after the year 1995, like Novi stanar (1998), Starost u Berlinu (1998), Carinska deklaracija (2000), Put na Aljasku (2006), Consul u Beogradu (2008) and the latest collection of writings entitled Mirni dani u Rovinju (2014), Imade the reconstruction of the writer maturation process to apositive / successfull aging. This one of the most famous post-Yugoslav stateless left Rovinj in 1995, were he moved from Belgrade in 1991, and then moved to Berlin, where he has been living during this time. At the beginning the German capital appears to Cosić as an unfriendly place that enhances the writer’s sense of alienation and old age. The writer defined his origin country as “the southern land”, while Berlin is acity in the north, which has became in his view asynonymous of old age or even death. On the pages of his works the author showed how gradually became familiar with this alien space. He found traces of his past and his former life in Belgrade in the urban space of Berlin. The recovery of memory and recollection open anew phase in the work of Bora Ćosić. Based on his works published after 2000 we could get aapicture of the artist, who seems to be atireless of his long life and has alot of work to do, who publishes new books and who is involved in many artistic events, readings and meetings with readers although he is 80. Ćosić is reconciled with old age and totally agrees with what fate brought to him. The evolution of attitudes towards life and old age are shown in the most complete way by his words that he often repeats: „I was born in Zagreb, I died in Belgrade, I live in Berlin”.
HR
U članku sam obratila pažnju na piščev doživljaj starosti. Zahvaljujući analizi autobiografskih knjiga, pre svega tekstova koje je autor objavio posle 1995. godine, kao što su: Novi stanar (1998), Starost u Berlinu (1998), Carinska deklaracija (2000), Put na Aljasku (2006), Consul u Beo-gradu (2008) inajnovija zbirka beležaka pod naslovom Mirni dani u Rovinju (2014), trudim se da ukažem Ćosićev put od negativne do pozitivne/uspešne starosti. Taj, jedan od najpoznatijih postjugoslavenskih apatrida, 1995. godine napustio je Rovinj, ukoji se preselio iz Beograda 1991. godine iotišao je uBerlin gde živi do danas. Čitajući tekstove, koje je autor napisao na početku svog boravka unemačkoj prestonici, može se zapaziti da se tamo osećao pre svega kao drugi, kao stranac. Osećaj tuđinstva je izazivao ipojačavao osećaj starosti. Pisac je često ponavljao da je njegova otadžbina ostala na jugu, aon je došao na sever, koji je podrazumevao kao sinonim starosti, čak ismrti. Usvojim tekstovima autor je zabeležio kako je upoznavao grad iotkrivao mnogo kutaka koji su ga podsećali na život uBeogradu. Na berlinskim ulicama iustarim zgradama pronašao je tragove svoje prošlosti. Zahvaljujući tome počeo je da se oseća uBerlinu kao unekoj vlastitoj prostoriji. Stekao je pamćenje ina taj način prekoračio je smrt. Povratak pamćenja, memorije, otvara novu fazu uĆosićevom stvaralaštvu. Uknjigama, koje je autor objavio posle 2000. godine, nalazimo sliku starog čoveka, koji uprkos svojoj starosti nije umoran, mnogo radi iuživa utome, stalno izdaje nove knjige, učestvuje umnogim umetničkim događajima, izlaganjima isastancima. Prihvata svoju starost islaže se sa time što mu je život doneo. Promenu stava prema životu istarosti na najbolji način pokazuje rečenica koju Ćosić često ponavlja: „Moja kratka biografija utri reda glasi: rođen sam uZagrebu, umro uBeogradu, živim u Berlinu”.
This article attempts to reconstruct and subsequently analyze the transformation of the public space of Košice between 1918 and 1945. It focuses primarily on the way the construction and deconstruction of monuments took place in the public space. The issue is illustrated with three case studies.
In this paper I discuss the possibilities of interpreting the archival materials of the Polski atlas etnograficzny by means of modern theories of memory. Referring to the theory of representation, memory locations or microhistory, new contexts of the functioning of phenomena or behaviours that are studied may be found in the records that were collected. The value of the source materials is not only in their substantive content but also in the scale of research with which they were collected. The atlas data, despite all their limitations, provide ample opportunities for the interpretation of such representations of the past, being a true reservoir of them. In many cases they require an individual approach, the knowledge of the specific context and a presentation of the interpretations in the form of a specific microhistory. Some, however, are experienced by a larger group of people, thus legitimizinginferences of a more general nature.
The author analyzes Karolina Grzywnowicz’s installation Weeds (2015): a meadow which the artist replanted from two villages in Bieszczady-whose inhabitants had been resettled in 1944-1950-into a site adjoining a street in Warsaw. The meadow was promptly mowed by the municipal services, and thus became a twofold commemoration. First, it was a deliberately created yet subtle and poetical monument to the displaced people. Second, in a manner unanticipated by the artist, it grew into a symbolic martyrdom memorial of the “green urban anarchists”: weeds in other words. The author analyzes the relationships between non-human lives and history, asking whether the marginal history of plants is ever noticed in scientific and social reflection, as well as wondering about the role of plants in commemoration and why they fail as a medium of memory.
This article is dedicated to the phenomenon of Cieszyn Silesia borderland in light of In Café "Avion", which does not exist by Renata Putzlacher, a poetess and Polonist from Czech Tesin. She is a Pole born in Zaolzie - the part of the region, which was assigned to Czechoslovakia after World War I and II - and in her compound book she struggles with her "split" identity. A symbol of both that split and Polish-Czech animosities is a border bridge on the river Olza. The article shows how Putzlacher has carried out the project of a metaphorical bridge building, which connects, not divides. She discovers the fortunes of a now-defunct café lying near the bridge on Olza and of its owner, a Jewess Rozalia Wiesner, as well as of other Cieszyn Jews. Their history is joined with the past of Putzlacher's family, which arrived to Cieszyn from Styria via Eastern Borderlands. Following the ancestors' paths and her own tangled roots, the poetess finds her manifold heritage and thanks to Rozalia she finds more universal dimension of foreignness - the fact, that one's own place is not something to find, but to build. The article's authoress demonstrates how Putzlacher replaces the cult of a little homeland with reminding about Poles', Czechs', Germans' and Jews' difficult life together in Cieszyn borderland. The poetess' main aim is to work for the present community, also by the reconstruction in a literary cabaret the spirit of Café "Avion", where Polish, Czech, German, Yiddish and a local dialect was heard. However, the work on such a task cannot be completed, because the community remains an utopia - a place which does not exist (yet).
Artykuł stanowi próbę takiej lektury pisarstwa Leo Lipskiego, która wskazywać będzie zasadność specyficznej, wciąż niedostatecznie zrozumianej i omówionej, konwencji przyjętej przez tego autora. Twórczość Lipskiego jawi się nie tylko jako świadectwo poszukiwania własnej dykcji, ale także jako staranie przezwyciężenia powojennego impasu, wykroczenia poza retorykę niewyrażalności, niemocy ekspresji, pustki, wreszcie – próbę przezwyciężania kryzysu języka i reprezentacji. Istotne w tym ujęciu jest ukazanie zależności między trzema porządkami: fakturami pamięci, materii i tekstu. Szczególnie bolesna pamięć o wydarzeniach Zagłady okazuje się fundacyjna dla analizowanej prozy – i to na wielu poziomach: zarówno tematycznym, jak i konceptualnym, językowym oraz stylistycznym.
EN
The article is an attempt to such reading of Leo Lipski which points at the legitimacy of specific, still insufficiently understood and described, convention adopted by the author in question. Lipski’s creativity is seen not only as a testimony of searching for his own diction but also as a struggle to overcome postwar deadlock, stepping outside the rhetoric of the inexpressible, incapacity of expression, emptiness, and ultimately an attempt at overcoming the crisis of language and representation. Important in this view is a demonstration of the interdependence of three orders, namely the framework of memory, the matter, and the text. Particularly painful memory about the Shoah proves to be foundational to the analysed prose on many levels, both thematic and conceptual, linguistic and stylistic.
The article focuses on three public holidays celebrated in the Czech Republic (28 September , 28 October, 17 November ), and shows the relationships between the Catholic confessional identity and memory and the Czech national identity and memory.