Wojciech H. Kalaga Libri

The purpose of this volume is to address the notion of cultural recycling by assessing its applicability to various modes of cultural and theoretical discourse. The word «recycling» is here used collectively to denote phenomena such as cyclicity, repetition, recurrence, renewal, reuse, reproduction, etc., which seem to be inalienable from basic cultural processes. Part of our purpose in proposing this theme is a desire to trace, confront, interrogate, and theorise the surviving phantoms of newness and paradigms of creativity or dreams of originality, and to consider the need, a necessity perhaps, to overcome or sustain them, and, further, to estimate the possibility of cultural survival if it turns out, as it may, that culture is forever to remain an endless recurrence of the same.

Nowadays the issues of space and place pertain more than ever to the ongoing discussion about personal/regional/national identities. The worlds of private archives of memory often exist independently of political and administrative divisions, while dominant ideologies are often capable of re-defining national archives of memory through selective representation of the past. The way we remember our past and our heritage inscribes the space we live in: the places we remember and the places we wish to forget, the monuments we pull down and erect and the museums we build are only some of the signposts on the landscape of our cultural memory. The essays collected in this volume examine the role of places and spaces in the formation of both cultural practices and the existential experience of modern individual.

The book addresses and interrogates discursive and cultural practices that are (or can be seen as) related to the well-established if elusive phenomenon known as Political Correctness or PC. The individual contributors look into PC-related cases within the humanities, literature, and the media. Accordingly, the publication is divided into three sections: Part I, «Revisiting the Issue: History, Theory, Language», examines PC in the contexts of three types of discourse: historical, theoretical and ideological, and linguistic. Part II, «Literary Case Studies», offers examinations of chosen literary works and authors. Part III, «The Media», looks at manifestations of PC-related issues in film and the popular magazine. Altogether the publication shows a variety of approaches to the PC phenomenon. The assumption of the editors is that while PC has indubitably penetrated contemporary culture, it continues to stir controversy. This scholarly debate is a response to what may be described as PC’s universal reign.

Multiculturalism has recently become a word without which hardly any discussion of identity, nationality or historical and ideological narratives seems possible. However, the popularity of this word and its current usefulness should not obscure the fact that the concept itself is not an easy and obvious one: many apparently firm assumptions have been disputed from a multicultural perspective, while there are still a great number of social, cultural and political spheres which need to be re-defined and re-articulated as some dominant notions and symbols have been subverted by recognition of the diversity of subjective positions and cultural identities. The concept of multiculturalism assumes that our identities – both individual and collective – are shaped by our relationships with others. This volume addresses issues of multiculturalism and identity in culture and reveals a wide spectrum of perspectives from which we look at the Other/the Unfamiliar/the Unknown. It is an attempt to reveal the patterns and practices our culture has used in order to envisage, negate or welcome the Other, and seeks to contribute to the ongoing discussion about multiculturalism.

Spoiling the Cannibals’ Fun? is not a volume about Captain Cook, unless one thinks the story of his having been eaten in the Polynesian tropics is not so much about the nourishing of the barbarians with a white man’s flesh, as one which raises a number of questions relating to, broadly understood, cultural encounters in which some sort of cannibalisation is always at stake. For example, an encounter with the other is inevitably also an encounter of what Penelope Deutscher sees as «the cannibal or ‘eating’ subject who is always already the other ‘in us’», an encounter which questions «the integrity of the subject’s boundaries». This volume takes up such various metaphorical senses of cannibalism and cannibalisation, and explores the ways they function within diverse domains and niches of culture (and elsewhere).

Peopled with diasporas and individuals, the space of exile persistently exists, though it cannot be circumscribed. Papers collected in the volume traverse that space in various directions, shedding some light on its manifold regions, niches, and chasms. Through raising diverse questions of ontology, subjectivity, power, otherness, domination, meaning, etc., the book aims at fulfilling its modest task of foregrounding points of orientation in the space’s topography, and perhaps of tracing out paths linking its different areas.

Baudrillard’s culture of simulation destroys our sense of paramount reality. It has created, as Chris Rojek puts it, a „huge refugee camp in which viewers, dissociated from place and community, are caught up in global indexing and dragging processes which no one controls.“ What is thus also, perversely, inscribed within the cultural landscape is a nostalgia for authenticity, for the dissimulated spaces and places which, though no longer there, stimulate their semiotic reconstructions and reproductions. And yet „[t]he possibility of lying is the prioprium of semiosis,“ as Umberto Eco has once remarked. Truth and falsity are inherent in the sign and in representation generally, subverting the tertium non datur principle. This book is an attempt to unmask representation, to see through the signs of the real, and through the real itself, at the realm of simulation. Those signs are not only signs of what they signify, but also signs of culture, of the cultural real which the articles included in the volume try to penetrate from various theoretical and philosophical perspectives.

At the turn of the millennium, memory has emerged as one of the key notions of the contemporary paradigm. This volume explores its involvement in the conceptualisation of culture as well as its underlying presence in literature and philosophy. Memory and its Other - forgetfulness - are approached from a variety of perspectives: in terms of past and present, finite and infinite; in the context of autobiography; with reference to the dichotomies of body/language and masculine/feminine; or as a recomposition or translation of the past experience. The issues discussed by individual papers include such diverse questions as the concept of memory as a form of interpretation, the impasse of subjective identity, the problem of the claim to immortality in Shakespeare's sonnets, the dialectic of memory and forgetting in Cymbeline and Pericles , or the interrelations between time and various modes of memory in the poetry of Paul Celan.

Nebulae of Discourse takes its inspiration from Peirce's philosophy, but merges its horizon with that of current critical theory, as well as confronts certain issues posed by post-Heideggerian hermeneutics. Its principal themes include the nebular nature of texts and of human subjectivity, questions of textual boundaries and limits, and interpretation construed as an ontological category. The book proposes a methodology which explores terrain feared by hermeneutics, but at the same time advocates a need for methodological rigour defied by deconstructive trends in post-structuralism. Unlike hermeneutics, this methodology recognizes the fact that there is no non-discursive reality; unlike deconstruction, it refuses to rely on the innocence of praxis without theory. The conditions of possibility of contemporary discourse themselves require conditions of possibility: an infrastructure of discursive mechanisms, of signs and semioses that allow specific practices to take place and to be meaningful. It is this fundamental, rudimentary infrastructure that constitutes the book's main focus.