Polish literature is deeply involved in history. Merely existential problems, separated from the context of the events shattering the life of community, rarely appear in it, for example in very early Romanticism, then in the Young Poland period (at the turn of 19th century, when the movement called Jugendstil, the equivalent of Secession in visual arts, appeared in Europe), and recently in the period of political transformation, as a result of so-called “Autumn of Nations” that took place in 1989.

The aim of this paper is to discuss fictional versions of the problematic of identity-formation of literary characters in situations of contact and conflict with the Other regarded as Enemy. Such a theme is quite prominent in 20th century narratives dealing with Polish-German relations. My focus will be on two characteristic works, whose action takes place soon after World War II, but which, written forty years apart, represent two very different approaches to the topic. In Tadeusz Nowakowski’s novel Obóz Wszystkich Świętych (All Saints’ Camp, 1957) an attempt to establish a dialogue between a Pole and a German in the immediately postwar period proves more than difficult, since it ends in a multifaceted failure. Not so in Stefan Chwin’s novel Krótka historia pewnego żartu (A Short History of a Certain Joke, 1991), in which the child-protagonist tries to reinterpret for his own sake the history of Polish-German relations, demonstrating in the process the extent to which that history is made up of multiple local narratives, both Polish and German, which in their sum form a far from straightforward overall story in the nature of a palimpsest. The paper will demonstrate how the two novels, by making use of local memory, try to overcome the stereotypes and consequences of the traumatic events of the war, which lie heavily on 20th century Polish-German neighborly relations. More specifically: what type of argument is deployed to redefine what immediately after World War II and long thereafter made the Polish attitude to the Germans particularly difficult.

This paper presents a comprehensive discussion of the Shoah in Polish prose. The author shows how Polish literature (prose, poetry and drama) has extensively preserved the Holocaust experience and has left the highest number of literary testimonies of this event compared to other world literatures. The sketch introduces the main topics explored by Polish authors (Polish-Jewish relations during the time of occupation and after the war, various strategies of recording the Shoah experience), as well as the evolution in presenting the Holocaust in Polish prose. In the conclusion, the author discusses the main issues facing Polish researchers: preliminary archival research in communist censorship resources, forming large, interdisciplinary research teams, creating a synthesis of Polish literature on the Shoah and global dissemination of knowledge concerning the richness of Polish literature on the Holocaust.

This paper examines narrative techniques of Ryszard Kapuściński. It presents the most important facts about professional biography of Polish reporter, showing the main places and historical moments he experienced. Kapuściński’s art of creative nonfiction writing is compared to New Journalism Movement were some elements of fiction were used to give the artistic interpretation of experienced reality. The author is focusing on three of Kapuściński’s books: The Emperor, Shah of Shahs and Travels with Herodotus examining different forms of structuring gathered information into parabola, collage or hermeneutic self-interpretation.

The presented reflections constitute an attempt to decipher the 20th century history recorded in written statements by one chosen aspect of the (post-)war trauma, that is, architecture and related spatial practices. The objective of this articles is to depict main models of perception and the description of urban spaces, as well as models recorded in contemporary literature and those that are a textual formula for the experience exceeding beyond the architectural-aesthetic dimension towards a political, cultural and social reflection. The reading of contemporary Polish literature leads through a matter from which the textual description of cities is built to an actual matter — to the building material of both the 20th century architectural and historical landscapes. The culture of burghers, which has introduced the tenement house life (including that fictional) into the Polish experience so late and for such a short time, has soon found an epilogue in the shape of a brick torn from a building and the (anti-)aesthetics of post-war ruins. The trauma (also the spatial one), the annihilation of cities, including the most significant — Warsaw, is verbalized in anti-fictional forms of anti-diaries, whose authors often are residents of symbols of reconstruction, socialism, and oblivion, erected after the war — districts of slab block housing estates that “block” with their cement weight the access to what is hidden beneath the lawns — the trauma. The author proposes to specify out of the former century three types of urban perception, treated here conventionally, whose symbols are: a tenement house/ruin and the construction material characteristic of Polish dilapidated buildings, i.e., a brick; post-war complexes, both institutional and residential, constructed from giant concrete slabs; lastly, stones of Western Europe seen with the eyes of a “barbarian” from beyond the Iron Curtain — a synonym of aesthetization of the observed reality.

The analysis concerns the experience of geographical space as a text which allows a reading of the time and experience of a particular place, and in which traces of the past initiate the work of memory. Interpreting works on space and place demands we bring in the interdisciplinary contexts of humanistic geography and geo‑history and employ the tools of geo‑poetics. I present the oeuvre of three writers. Erwin Kruk narrates the post‑war identity drama in the Masuria and the traces of its belonging to Germany. Kruk contemplates individual memory confronted with geographical space seen as historical text. Andrzej Stasiuk’s descriptions of traveling in Eastern Europe as newly divided by borders belong to the poetics of postcolonialism. Jerzy Limon presents the space of the city of Sopot as a palimpsest, read by the narrator as a historian‑archeologist.

Amidst the sound and fury of climate change today, we as a group want to address not just how men created the climate crisis, but how men help create nature as well. Of course, by nature, we mean a particular type of nature, man-made landscapes, to be more exact. Manufactured Landscapes is an ecocritical term that refers primarily to those industrial and urbanizing constructions that are disturbingly massive and sublime and have over time infused their presence in the human subconscious as part of the natural landscape. The term has gained rapid traction among scholars of ecocriticism in their study of ecology and literature worldwide as it heralds the advent of naming our current phase of earthly existence Anthroposcene — the recent geological testimony to the dominance of human-led alterations across the face of Planet Earth. Alongside this rising awareness has emerged the act of our awakening to a couple of key notions related to man-made landscapes.

The year 2006 witnessed the publication of two landmark Chinese novels on global health crises: Hu Fayun’s Ru Yan@sars.come on the SARS epidemic and Yan Lianke’s Dream of Ding Village on the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Although the primary focus of these novels is exposing human and especially bureaucratic culpability for the rapid spread of fatal diseases, Such Is This World and Dream of Ding Village also interrogate relationships between human communities and the natural environment. At the same time that Hu Fayun’s text exposes human destruction of the biotic and abiotic nonhuman, it ultimately dismisses the anthropogenic reshaping of landscapes brought about by human hubris by underlining human vulnerability in the face of both disease and nature. In contrast, Yan Lianke’s work depicts human vulnerability to disease, in combination with hubris, as largely responsible for destroying the natural world.

The term “manufactured landscapes” has negative, critical, and even ironic connotations. It refers to landscapes that have been deformed, destroyed, or devastated by human industrial endeavour, such as shipyards, dams, abandoned quarries and mines, and recycling junkyards of industrial waste. These man-made landscapes are closely related to energy consumption and environmental deterioration, and are symbols of troubled relations between humankind and nature. This article will explore the manufactured landscapes presented in Chinese science fiction, specifically three of Liu Cixin’s SF novellas. Using the SF analytical framework, I argue that in Liu Cixin’s three novellas, the aesthetic of estrangement is created by the extrapolative manufactured landscapes of huge bubbles, a long tunnel, and a coal mine on fire. These environmental extrapolations lead to cognition of an energy crisis, the depletion of natural resources, the degeneration of the environment, as well as possible solutions to these various environmental and energy problems. In addition, I contend that there is an intertexuality between Liu’s imaginative manufactured landscapes in the novellas and the manufactured landscapes in the author’s empirical world such as the Three Gorges Dam, the South-to-North Water Diversion project, the Shanghai Magnetic Railway, and numerous coal mines in China.

In the course of modernization, China has been witnessing rapid industrialization and urbanization, which is undoubtedly built on the unprecedented transformation of the physical world, and has in turn greatly impacted the lives of the Chinese and their sense of place and space. Contemporary Chinese, when compared with their ancestors, have obtained much greater freedom enabled by enhanced mobility and extended space. On the other hand, more space brings them, other than freedom and widened horizon, feelings of being uprooted and thus of estrangement from their ancestral and spiritual home. Jia Zhangke has captured this dilemma with which contemporary Chinese are faced in his two films: The World (2004) and Still Life (2006). Following Yi-fu Tuan’s place-space framework, this paper examines how the four protagonists, namely, Zhao Xiaotao and Cheng Taisheng in The World, and San Ming, the coal miner, and Shen Hong, the nurse in Still Life, experience the overwhelming transformation in their lives, brought out by the country’s deep plunge into industrialization and urbanization. I thereby argue that Jiang Zhangke’s combined use of documentary and surreal elements skillfully presents Chinese people’s dilemma in the era of transformation and critical changes.

Amidst the impressive growth of China’s industrial workings, we have detected a dubious trend of “manufactured landscapes.” Taking cue from Burtynsky’s term, I have focused intensely on such alteration of the nonhuman material world by revealing how the trend has wrought illusion, displacement and transfiguration of man’s relationship with water, land and other forms of materiality which has hitherto remained fused and bonded with man’s sustained livelihood. Acting on a similar impulse, the film documenters in China and overseas have explored China’s recent massive industrial and commercial constructions that have radically altered the basic nature of her vast landscape, and have drastically affected the bond between human habitat and the natural environment. I explore the layered complexity in documenting the disruptive impact of these man-made landscapes by means of “affective intervention” — by looking closely at scenes taken from Burtynsky’s Manufactured Landscapes (2007) and Hu Jie’s The Silent Nu River (2006). In the former, I stress how Burtynsky and Baichwal use the camera’s panning shots to tease out and mediate the little contested framing of still photography, while in the latter, I underscore how Hu Jie adroitly deploys the camera to involve the people being interviewed and viewers to record moments of conflict and negotiation. Both documentary films shed light on the embedded agency of both human and non-human forces in its indigenous cultural and social environs.

After deconstruction and postmodernism which had been engaging the confrontation with the Other, literary theory and criticism have been encountering the “Ethical Turn.” After the famous Paul de Man’s downfall, a new argument of ethical reconsideration appeared in the forefront of the literary discourse against deconstructionist and postmodernist assumptions that human beings are the unconscious and social construct. Martha Nussbaum and Wayne are initiating trailblazers, initiating present insightful renderings of what’s at stake in ethical criticism. In this context, one thing I noticed intriguing in Prof. Nie Zhenzhao’s book, An Introduction to Ethical Literary Criticism (2014), is that an economic and cultural sea change in China anticipates the future anterior of the critical exchange in the field of critical theory in Asia at large.

As an original critical theory formulated by a Chinese scholar, ethical literary criticism has received a large amount of attention from the academics. This paper, with reference to Nie Zhenzhao’s new monograph Introduction to Ethical Literary Criticism, reviews the background and significance of ethical literary criticism before illuminating its major arguments and core issues such as the origin of literature, the existential forms of text (brain text, material text, and digital text), ethical selection, and Sphinx factor. Apart from surveying the critical receptions of ethical literary criticism in China, it also offers three tentative suggestions for the future development of this new critical theory, namely, the construction of its critical principles, the examination of the interconnections between ethics and narrative forms, and the necessity of placing dialogues between ethical criticism in the West and ethical literary criticism in China.

At the beginning of the 21st century, postclassical narratology is a focus in western academics, while it is insufficiently studied in China. Contemporary Western Narratology: Postclassical Perspective explores the major schools and core concepts of western postclassical narratology and sheds a new light on them from a Chinese scholar’s perspective. Reviewing this valuable work, the paper aims at highlighting the insights of this work and makes it suggestive to scholars interested in narrative inquires of various kinds.

Ethical Choice and Value Judgment: Study on Lawrence Durrell’s Ensemble Novels written by Xu Bin and published by Fu Dan University Press in 2014 has employed literary ethical criticism as its critical paradigm and revealed the ethical structures and connotations in Durrell’s ensemble novels. The monograph has broken through the theoretical bottle neck of the present international scholarship on Durrell and made a great contribution to Durrellian scholarship and related English and American Literature studies. The monograph has deciphered questions related with Durrell’s artistic ethical selections. Durrell’s artistic ethical selections are reflected in his ethical pursuit of inheriting and surpassing his predecessors and his ethical reflections on motifs such as sex, self-fulfillment and place in modern, postmodern and postcolonial contexts.