Patriotism of Tomorrow? The Commemoration and Popularization of the Warsaw Rising Through Comics

As one of the most lethal urban combats ever, the Warsaw Rising evoked narrative representations even before the fighting had stopped Along with the courageous 1939 defence of the city against the invading Nazis and the 1943 Ghetto Uprising, the Rising contributed to the Myth of Warsaw, that is, the glorification of Warsaw's heroic resistance to German attempts to annihilate the city Particularly since 1989, the Warsaw Rising 'master narrative' has steadily gained prominence, reaching its peak in 2004, when the sixtieth anniversary of the insurgence was celebrated with the opening of the Warsaw Rising Museum Typical of this last phase of commemoration is the stimulation of the use of popular artistic media such as rock music, graffiti art, and comics A striking example of this tendency is a yearly comic competition which is supported by the Museum and which resulted in four comics anthologies, and, indirectly, also in a series of individual comic books, and a professional comics anthology This article investigates whether these comics merely affirm the Warsaw Rising as a sacrosanct landmark of national identity or if they also offer 'a surplus of meaning that exceeds set ideological boundaries, opening spaces for reflection and counter-hegemonic memory

The janus-faced author: Narrative unreliability and metafiction in Karol Irzykowski's 'Paluba' and Witold Gombrowicz's 'Ferdydurke'

Only a few months after the publication of Ferdydurke (1937), two major voices in twentieth-century Polish literature, Bruno Schulz and Artur Sandauer, came up with the hypothesis that Karol Irzykowski's only novel Pałuba (1903) was an immediate predecessor of Gombrowicz's novel. Although any such influence of Pałuba on his first and most successful novel was categorically denied by the author himself, Gombrowicz must have been acquainted with at least some details of its exceptional literary form ever since he started writing his own experimental prose. The question remains, however, what made both Schulz and Sandauer conclude that Ferdydurke descended from Pałuba – and from Pałuba alone. The present article sets out to answer this question, not only by elucidating what the two critics might have thought about the connection between both novels, but also by adding some new arguments from a contemporary narratological standpoint. More specifically, I claim that a more cautious approach to both novels' alleged “discursivity”, which appears to be less reliable than commonly thought, might pave the way for an analogous metafictional reading of their entire textual structure

World War 2.0: commemorating war and holocaust in Poland through Facebook

The Internet seems to have become the area where instances of individual and collective remembrance, of private and public commemoration, and of memory and postmemory intersect in a new and effective way. This article explores two Polish examples of World War II and Holocaust commemoration that have recently been issued on Facebook: the Warsaw Rising commemorative campaign and the educational project on the young Holocaust victim Henio Żytomirski. As the analysis demonstrates, what determines the value of such online projects is their performative effectiveness. The examination of both examples aims to contribute to the current debate on cultural memory, in which the focus is increasingly on the dynamical and processual character of remembering, rather than on memory as a static product

Mastering the Siege. Ideology and the Plot of the Leningrad Blockade and the Warsaw Uprising in Adamovich and Granin, and Bialoszewski

Master narratives of the relief of major cities can find their counterparts in particular individual accounts of the same events. Whereas the former tend to be 'monologic' and are characterized by an 'epic' plot, the latter may display features of 'polyphony' and plotlessness. Works by Adamovich and Granin, and by Bialoszewski, serve as illustrations