Institute of English Studies

The paper deals with a popular type of the Annunciation lyric in medieval English poetry. A brief survey of the role of the angelic announcement to Mary in medieval art and culture is given. The argument then pursues several distinctive traits of this kind of lyric in a number of poems from the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries. The distinguishing features include a tripartite structure, a common set of words, phrases, ideas and images, emphasis on singing, a spring setting, tryst between lovers, and the use of popular genres, particularly ballads and carols. By analogy with music, it is argued that a certain popular code for the Annunciation existed, against which interesting artistic transformations of the theme were introduced. For example, the Annunciation was evoked in a highly compressed and allusive manner by means of but a few elements of the code. The principal elements of the alleged code derived from popular art and imagination. Their application to theological issues frequently led to the blurring of boundaries between the sacred and the profane, and between the Christian and the pagan. The paper proposes a distinction between Lent and alleluia subtypes of the Annunciation lyric. It also demonstrates how the pastourelle, aubade, and chanson d'aventure conventions of secular love poetry were adapted to represent the Annunciation. Finally, it suggests a connection between the lyric "At a spryng wel" and a specific statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary, like the much-reverenced statue of Our Lady at Walsingham.

The paper discusses erotic desire and the motif of going on pilgrimage in the opening of Geoffrey Chaucer’s General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales and in William Shakespeare’s sonnets. What connects most of the texts chosen for consideration in the paper is their diptych-like composition, corresponding to the dual theme of eros and pilgrimage. At the outset, I read the first eighteen lines of Chaucer’s Prologue and demonstrate how the passage attempts to balance and reconcile the eroticism underlying the description of nature at springtime with Christian devotion and the spirit of compunction. I support the view that the passage is the first wing of a diptych-like construction opening the General Prologue. The second part of the paper focuses on the motif of pilgrimage, particularly erotic pilgrimage, in Shakespeare’s sonnets. I observe that most of the sonnets that exploit the conceit of travel to the beloved form lyrical diptychs. Shakespeare reverses the medieval hierarchy of p...

This article links the Franklin’s Tale to England’s cross-Channel territorial ambitions in the years immediately preceding and following the peace of Brétigny. I suggest that Chaucer wrote this tale in remembrance of his stays in France in 1359–60 and in Aquitaine in early 1366, and as a Breton lay of recent rather than ancient times. I point to the private and secret nature of Dorigen’s marriage and connect it to the complicated marital situation of Joan of Kent. My biographical reading finds support in Chaucer’s metapoetic reflection in the tale, which seems to inscribe a personal element into courtly literature.

The aim of this article is to substantiate the thesis that together with the development of the plot of Persuasion, the cognitive power of the principal heroine expands, and she becomes a highly sensitive reader of human minds. This thesis is supported by references to the new ‘Romantic’ psychology, emphasizing the close links between the innate aspects of the mind and the body. Psychological insight demonstrates the fragmentation of Anne Elliot’s mind, the role of the unconscious, and the division between the interior and the exterior. There is also analysis of the significance of Anne’s frequent change of transitory lodgings, along with interpretation of the narrative strategy, especially free indirect speech and mediated speech (the function of eavesdropping) and the important role of body language.

Zgodnie z aktualną wiedzą biologiczną można zakładać, że historia spotkań z psami jest zapisana nie tylko w kolektywnej pamięci kulturowej, ale też w molekułach, z których zbudowane są nasze organizmy W ciągu ostatnich dekad europejska humanistyka dokonywała rewizji poglądów na relację pomiędzy ludźmi a środowiskiem naturalnym-podejmując próbę naprawy błędu, który można najogólniej określić mianem antropocentryzmu. Założenie (często milczące) o wyjątkowości istot ludzkich uważa się za jeden z filarów tradycji judeochrześcijańskiej, skonsolidowanej u progu nowoczesności przez myślicieli, którzy na pozór wcale nie byli wiernymi sługami kościoła. Na liście inkryminowanych propagatorów antropocentryzmu umieszcza się zwykle Francisa Bacona, jednego z twórców nowoczesnego paradygmatu naukowego, i Kartezjusza. Także drugie źródło, z którego europejska duchowość czerpie wodę na swój humanistyczny młyn, czyli Grecja, nie daje podstaw do zakwestionowania chrześcijaństwa w tym akurat względzie. W Polsce wnikliwie pisze o tych kwestiach między innymi Olga Tokarczuk (przede wszystkim "Maski Zwierząt", opublikowane w zbiorze "Moment niedźwiedzia" (http://www.dwutygodnik.com/artykul/3476)). Post-humanistyczna rewizja przełomu XX i XXI wieku dotyczy przede wszystkim bytów kolektywnie zwanych zwierzętami. Dużo się mówi-i słusznie-o konieczności włączenia zwierzęcia w obręb refleksji etycznej, a także ponownego zdefiniowania człowieczeństwa w świetle z bólem nabywanej świadomości, że podział na ludzkie i nie-ludzkie jest arbitralny i należy do sfery ideologii, nie empirii. W klasycznym już eseju "Otwarte" Giorgio Agamben pisał, że granica pomiędzy człowiekiem a zwierzęciem przebiega wewnątrz człowieka. Myśl filozoficzna Jacques'a

The paper attempts to look at Schulz poetics in the light of object oriented ontology in order to demonstrate that the fascinating power of his prose derives, among other sources, from "thing power" (Jane Bennett's phrase) expressed in his fiction.

This article aims to read Forrest Gander's Pulitzer-winning 2018 volume, Be With, in the context of Judith Butler's notion of vulnerability and the Buddhist concept of interbeing, introduced by Thích Nhất Hạnh. Gander's search for a poetics of listening reaches a new intensity in Be With, a poetic lament for a deceased beloved. In this groundbreaking work, grief becomes a means of knowing the world where knowledge is understood "not as recitation but as/ the unhinging somatic event" (Gander 2018, 28). The new way of engaging with the world triggers a subjective reconfiguration that leads to the articulation of a deeply empathic poetics of vulnerability which becomes the basis for telling new stories of human, interspecies, and mineral entanglements.

Instances by Jeongrye Choi. Hillman teaches at St. Mary's College where she is the Olivia C. Filippi Professor of Poetry; she is an activist for social and environmental justice. Hillman's poems draw on elements of found texts and documents, personal meditation, observation, and literary theory. Often described as "sensuous" and "luminescent," her work investigates and pushes at the possibilities of form and voice, while remaining grounded in topics such as geology, the environment, politics, family, and spirituality.

Against the background of the Polish parliament's consideration of a law that would effectively ban abortion and the ensuing protests, Julia Fiedorczuk reflects on a particular aspect of women's strangeness in contemporary Poland-their alienation from highbrow literary culturewhich she finds especially conspicuous in the case of poetry. 1 "Women are strangers in the country of man," wrote Laura Riding in the 1930s, as militant, nationalistic sentiments intensified across Europe. I read that sentence, along with Riding's other writings on womanhood, as a graduate student toiling slowly on a dissertation about this remarkable poet's work. In the context of turn-of-the century feminist theories' tendency to complicate the notion of femininity, Riding's pronouncement sounded a little archaic, if not downright mystical. After all, many women felt perfectly at home in that "country," and many men did not. And who were those women, anyway, women in the plural, as opposed to the singularity of "man"? Fifteen years later, in the fall of 2016, as I am sitting down to write this essay, a wave of protests moves across my country in reaction to a proposed new law under discussion in the Polish parliament that would effectively ban abortion. Women of various backgrounds and outlooks experience a powerful moment of solidarity. Even though the sense of female fellowship soon begins to fade as the protests evolve and diversify, with some women formulating more radical demands that other women find impossible to support, feminism, after years of dormancy in the ivory towers of academia, is back in the streets. Women rediscover the shared aspects of their experiences, often connected with humiliation, objectification, and silencing, all linked with male domination, represented in the present situation by the combined forces of right-wing government and the Catholic Church. In spite of all the differences, many women experience a similar sense of alienation in the world where massive antifeminist backlash accompanies a resurgence of aggressive nationalistic feelings. Since the nation-state is by its very nature militant, it must idealize violence. As much of our public discourse, and even some of our highbrow literature, extolls mythologized images of men with guns, women are pushed back to the niches of traditional femininity-to strangeness. Whether this collective experience will form the basis for a sustained and effective twenty-firstcentury women's movement still remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: something happened in the past few months that caused many of us to (re)awaken.