24 April 2009, room 601A, 6 PM

dr Paweł Stachura

Application of the term baroque to American popular culture.

The presentation is about my ongoing postdoctoral project. Regardless of temporal and geographical caesuras, the approach can be legitimized by a synthetic demonstration of stylistic and ideological features shared by baroque and pop. The subsequent demonstration of numerous similarities between baroque and popular culture, especially in stylistic methods understood as methods of entertaining mass audiences and appealing to their taste, is a markedly ahistorical procedure. The intention, however, is not to present today, or any other period between the Civil War and today, as "a new baroque" comparable to Shestov's "new middle ages" or Mathiessen's "American Renaissance," because the present discussion makes no claims about a spirit of the age. Instead, it is assumed that stylistic features of baroque can persist regardless of the ideological and real background of works of art. Another reservation is that baroque does not necessarily exist in the entire culture; its persistence is limited to popular culture.

dr Janusz Kaźmierczak

Travel as pilgrimage: Andrzej Kijowski’s American journey

Andrzej Kijowski (1928-1985) was in his time a leading Polish literary critic and prose writer. In the early 1970s he managed to travel to the United States on the invitation of the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. In 1982 he published an account of this journey in the book Podróż na najdalszy Zachód [Journey to the Farthest West]. This presentation investigates Kijowski’s encounter with “America,” as depicted in this book, as well as in Kijowski’s Dziennik [Diary], published posthumously in the late 1990s in the changed context of post-communist Poland. The theoretical framework for this investigation is that of Victor Turner’s processual analysis, especially as it has been applied to the study of pilgrimage. Some divergence notwithstanding, this framework seems to be well-suited for the interpretation and theorization of Andrzej Kijowski’s cross-cultural journey.