From Your Land to Poland

The present proposes an original confrontation between the points of view of scholars and artists about the notion of the contemporary commitment of writers.

The stormy history of Poland has made commitment a staple feature of much Polish writing. Awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980, Czesaw Miosz is not only a good example of a Polish committed writer, he also illustrates the complexity of literary commitment in contemporary society. The centenary of his birth in 2011 offered the opportunity to tackle the question of writers' commitment during the international conference «From Your Land to Poland: On the Commitment of the Writer in European and Polish Literature in the 20th and 21st Centuries», which took place on the 17th and the 18th November 2011 at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. The present volume offers selected contributions presented on that occasion and thus proposes an original confrontation between the points of view of scholars and artists about the notion of the contemporary commitment of writers.

Autorentext

Dorota Walczak-Delanois is Professor at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and Chair of the Polish Language and Culture Department. She is a specialist of Polish avant-garde poetry and her research focuses on relations between image and poetry in Polish and European poetry in the 20th and the 21st century from a comparative perspective.
Katia Vandenborre is an FNRS Postdoctoral Researcher working in the Polish Language and Culture Department of the Université Libre de Bruxelles. She investigates Polish literary fairy tales from the perspective of their intertextual, intermedial and intercultural dialogue with European traditions.
Petra James is the Chair of the Czech Language and Literature Department at the Université Libre de Bruxelles where she also teaches classes on Central European Culture. Her two main research topics are comparative history of the avant-garde and cultural memory issues in the works of contemporary Central European authors.

Inhalt

Contents: Olivier Estèves: «In the thick of it». Bertrand Russell and the First World War (1914-1918) - Aleksander Fiut: The Adventures of a 20th Century Gulliver. Some Remarks on The Native Realm - Anna Nasilowska: Czeslaw Milosz - Difficult Polishness - Kris Van Heuckelom: Metaphorizing the Vocation of the Poet. Czeslaw Milosz and the «Kernel of the Thicket» - Marta A. Skwara: Real and Virtual Witkacy. On the Roles Acted by/upon the Artist in the 20th and 21st Century - Arent van Nieukerken: Ovid and Two Types of Exile. Zbigniew Herbert and Osip Mandelstam - Dorota Walczak-Delanois: Down with Monuments!? The Case of Tadeusz Rózewicz - Agnieszka Szmidt: Populations Displaced. Jan Klata's Staging of Transfer! - Xavier Luffin: Can Arab Writers Living in Europe Elude Political Commitment? - Meenakshi Bharat: Finding a Voice - Antoine Cassar: Rage - that Other, Inevitable Muse - Ostap Dzondza: On a Commitment to Europe, «the Borderlands», and «the Three Halves of a City» ... - Joël Goffin: Writing and Commitment - Inga Iwasiów: Commitment and Readability - Szczepan Kopyt: On the Question of Political Engagement - Martin Reiner: A Call in a Whisper - Pierre Schroven: In the Impatience of Love.