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The paper is concentrated on the autobiography in the writings of Stefan Żółkiewski. Due to the lack of classic autobiography, Sidorowicz decides to analyze archival materials, prefaces and interviews that meet the condition of Lejeune’s autobiographical pact. The analysis focuses, in accordance with the title metaphor, on the kinks visible in these texts. in order to draw attention to the conditions under which a strong self-construction appears. The author tries to show that a constitutive feature of Żółkiewski’s autobiographical writing is its strong involvement in society biographies.

Autobiographies are traditionally understood as means of selfredemption or self-validation of the respective autobiographers, but they seem to have become tools of self-assertion in the recent times. The writers of this paper noticed that the underlying patterns in major autobiographies of the respective centuries such as those of Augustine, Rousseau, Virginia Woolf, Han Suyin and other male or female autobiographers commonly evolve around one’s ethical choices in response to the vices caused by one’s natural will and when facing ethical dilemmas caused by life challenges. This paper examines the abovementioned autobiographies via the Ethical Literary Criticism (ELC). Developed by Professor Nie Zhenzhao since 2004, ELC is one of the most insightful critiques in expounding the relationship of the self with oneself, self with others, and self with the divine or higher moral order in the context of the literary world.

The role of place names in Dostoevsky’s literary texts is never reduced to a nominative function, which consists in the designation of the place of action of the work. The peculiarity of toponymic vocabulary in fiction is explained by its ability to act as an indicator (and in the Dostoevsky’s texts – as a generator) of the chronotope, which is due to the connection of place names with a certain historical era. Dostoevsky’s literary texts demonstrate the relationship between toponymic and anthroponymic space: the name of a geographical object determines the proper names of those who inhabit it. In this paper we study the toponymic space of the little-studied Dostoevsky’s novel «Uncle’s dream». Place names Mordasov, Duhanovo, Igishevo are regarded as text- and plot-units. The onomastic space of the story, organized by place names, reflects the writer’s desire for topographical accuracy, but at the same time the toponymic system of the story «Uncle’s dream» adjusts the reader to the perception of the world of sleep, where everything is possible: the distortion of the concepts of good and evil, the transformation of life into a farce, mutually beneficial coexistence of dolls and people. Place names and anthroponyms introduced into the text of the story represent an important feature of the Dostoevsky’s creative laboratory all periods – the attraction to semantically marked onomastic units. The proper names of the works of art by Dostoevsky are a system conditioned by both the ideological content and the chronotope, in the formation of which toponyms actively participate, which can be observed already in the story «Uncle’s dream». Many place names of the novel under study, like the place names of other works of the writer, are autobiographical, and therefore each proper name in the Dostoevsky’s literary texts should be considered in the context of the unity of his creative and life path.

Il documento qui presentato, tratto dalle carte di Ettore Pais (1856–1939) recentemente tornate alla luce, è uno scritto autobiografico concepito per una pubblicazione che non vide mai la luce. Elaborato tra il 1925 e il 1927, il testo ripercorre la carriera e le pubblicazioni dello storico fino a quel momento, trat­teggiando i momenti fondanti del suo percorso culturale. Ettore Pais, attra­verso un lungo excursus sulla cultura storica e archeologica in Italia, esplicita le influenze ricevute e i concetti su cui si era venuto formando il suo metodo d’indagine storica, sottolineando i punti fondamentali della sua visione della storia italiana, antica e moderna, evidenziandone la continuità. This is the edition of a document drawn from some recently discovered papers of Ettore Pais (1856–1939): it is an autobiographical text that was originally intended for publication and never saw the light of day. It was written between 1925 and 1927, and surveys the historian’s career and published work, charting the main stages of his intellectual trajectory. Pais provides a lengthy overview of the historical and archaeological culture in Italy, discusses the key influences on his work and the concepts that shaped his historical methodology, and states the key tenets of his vision of Italian history, both ancient and modern, in which strong emphasis is placed on continuity.

In the history of philosophy, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is mainly considered as an atypical philosopher of the Enlightenment, as a pioneer of the revolutionary idea of a free civilian state and natural law; in literary history, he is considered the forerunner of Romanticism, the writer who perfected the form of an epistolary novel, as well as a sentimentalist. However, this paper focuses on the biographical approach, which was mostly excluded in observation of those works revealing Rousseau as the originator of the autobiographical novelistic genre. The subject of this paper is the issue of credibility of self-portraits, and through this problem it highlights the facts from the author’s life. This paper relies on a biographical approach, not in the positivistic sense but in the phenomenological key. This paper is mainly inspired by the works of the Geneva School theorists - Starobinski, Poulet and Rousset.

In this article I present a rich biography of Vilém Flusser (1920–1991) – Czech-Jewish media philosopher. However, I am interested not only in his life history, but also in his attitude to his own cultural identity. In the following paragraphs of the paper, I present the most important periods of his life: the Prague period, emigration, the Brazilian period, and his return to Europe. Each of these stages brought a new quality to Flusser’s life and work, even if it was related to tragic events. And since, in this author’s case, life was closely related to philosophy – the topics he tackled, the way he was philosophizing – this text also deals in part with Vilém Flusser as a theoretician.

This paper analyses how, through a transposition of photographic methods to literary composition, Edouard Levé (1965-2007) reconfigures the literary genre of the portrait, and situates his work at an unstable threshold from which he explores the border between the visible and the invisible, the knowable and the unknowable, existence and essence. The photographic archive that lends its shape to the text implies an externalization of the definition of identity, which thwarts any ontological discourse that would explain subjective essence as the source of identity and reality. Identity becomes a panoptic collection of the self, which points to the invisible mystery of identity and meaning beneath the surface of the visible.

This paper discusses “Milonga for Gombrowicz”, an essay written by Juan Carlos Gómez in which the author begins by reflecting upon Gombrowicz’s “Diary”. As Gómez was one of the Polish writer’s closest Argentinean friends, the biographical perspective enables the text in question to be read as an intimate history of their relationship that is also shared with the public. As the analysis presented in this article shows, Gombrowicz’s work offered Gómez an opportunity to metaphorically resume their conversations which had been disrupted when Gombrowicz departed Argentina, providing him with a pretext to present his own philosophical views, and above all to convince readers that he was the only legitimate “heir” to Gombrowicz’s “throne”.

In this paper, I present a philosophical analysis of the famous manga series, Barefoot Gen (Hadashi no Gen) by Keiji Nakazawa, which is the author’s quasi‑fictional memoir of his childhood as an atom bomb survivor in Hiroshima, Japan. Against the backdrop of larger issues of war and peace, Gen’s family struggles with his father’s ideological rebellion against the nation’s militaristic rule, leading to the family’s persecution. The story then chronicles the cataclysmic effects of the bomb, and the fates of Gen and other survivors as they live through the aftermath of the detona‑tion and the hardships of the American occupation. My framework for critique fol‑lows Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutical phenomenology, which applies the descriptive method of phenomenology to cultural texts.

In this paper, I examine how women graphic memoirists – Marjane Satrapi, Alison Bechdel, and Roz Chast in particular – attempt to draw that which remains fleeting, absent, and abyssal: the so-called “self.” I thus extend Jacques Derrida’s critique of what he has called the “metaphysics of presence” in philosophy to autobiographical comics, a popular medium that is heavily prefigured by his analysis of the self-portrait as a ruin. I believe this endeavor will help fill the gap in studies about the gendered as-pects of Derrida’s work Memoirs of the Blind, as well as the potential of autobiographical comics to illuminate philosophical issues concerning the self. Finally, through my analysis of women’s graphic narratives, I hope to point to the possibility of a larger project, that of a feminist Derridean critique of sequential art.

The aim of the paper is to analyze the narrative and photographic thresholds of Leggenda privata by Michele Mari (2017). The first case is a rhetorical artifice, a horror-gothic-fantastic narrative threshold, that Mari creates to distinguish the present of writing from the past of memories, intended, as I will try to demonstrate, to problematize the crucial questions of autobiography: incipit and explicit of the narration, literature and bios, fiction and non-fiction. Mari adds another expedient to this one: the inclusion of family photographs, selected from his personal archive, and that, for the variety of their authors, reveal another threshold, that between the writer and the photographer. A main topic of the theory on the autobiographical phototext is thus proposed, that is the hypothetical identity of the author of the photos and that of the narration, and above all their mutual relationship, played in terms of extraneousness, coincidence or partial overlap. The two thresholds serve to highlight the critical aspects of autobiographical writing and to redefine its scope in an autofictional field, where the frontiers between factual and fictional, on the one hand, and between writing and literary theory, on the other, are destined to dissolve.

Mickiewicz, poetry and anecdote. Questions about the identity of the creator in poem Ten to też by Tadeusz Różewicz The paper addresses narrative strategies applied by Tadeusz Różewicz in his poem Ten to też (This is also) from the volume Szara strefa (Grey zone), an imagined episode in Adam Mickiewicz’s life. The analysis of the ironic intertextual play with the genre of epistolary reminiscences shows the contemporary writer’s struggle with the Romantic myth of the outstanding, pioneering poet. In the light of parallel experiences of living and writing, Różewicz’s dilemmas of an artist and a human being can be shown by means of an apparently amusing story of a social insult. The biographical anecdote turns out to be a latent attempt at an autobiographical utterance.

The article attempts to investigate Julian Kornhauser’s autobiographical strategies in his writings. The author endeavors to interpret the fragments of the poet’s biography, focusing on his typical manner of intimate addressing himself (narrative distance, discrepancy between the narrator and the persona, concealing characters under the veil of the cipher). The starting point for these considerations, as well as the main object of this paper, is Kornhauser’s autobiographical prose entitled A Home, a Dream, and Child’s Plays [Dom, sen i gry dziecięce]. Its reading is juxtaposed with the autobiographical notes published in literary periodicals by Jakub Kornhauser, the poet’s son. The whole project is also possible due to the examination of the critical reception and the reconstruction of the truth about Kornhauser’s life.

The paper aims to show that in his prose oeuvre, Matoš appropriates the typical fairy tale elements, unifies different fairy tale traditions and adapts them pursuant to the symbolist poetics in order to create his own variation of a modernist literary fable (Kunstlermärchen).

The Problem of human suffering in “Autobiografia mistyczna” (“Mystical autobiography”) of Carmelite Anna Maria Marchocka Summary The paper presents a few aspects of human suffering based on the example of mystical experiences of a Carmelite nun, Anna Maria Marchocka. The work includes descriptions from her early childhood, novitiate period, when the suffering was rooted in loneliness, physical ailments that brought the suffering of the soul and body, as well as the three stages of a mystical path: purification, enlightenment and union. These descriptions show the reader that Marianna Marchocka did not only embrace the suffering but also the attitude that helped her to understand the events around her on the path to sainthood.

This short working paper is my first attempt to present my concept analysis of relation between the poverty experiences – e.g. childhood suffering by war and migration background, daily life suffering by starvation, abuse, racism etc. – and the process of self-understanding and resilience with the help of an oral history or literature (non-fiction as much as fiction novels). I reflect Wilhelm Dilthey’s opinion about the distinction between autobiography and Self-biography, and I present the Self-biography as a right way to concretize the themes of poverty and exclusion.

The paper explores the growing use of tools from the arts and humanities for investigation and dissemination of social science research. Emerging spaces for knowledge transfer, such as the World Wide Web, are explored as outlets for "performative social science". Questions of ethnics and questions of evaluation which emerge from performative social science and the use of new technologies are discussed. Contemporary thinking in aesthetics is explored to answer questions of evaluation. The use of the Internet for productions is proposed as supporting the collective elaboration of meaning supported by Relational Aesthetics. One solution to the ethical problem of performing the narrations of others is the use of the writer's own story as autoethnography. The author queries autoethnography's tendency to tell "sad" stories and proposes an amusing story, exemplified by "The One about Princess Margaret" (see http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/rt/suppFiles/281/618). The conclusion is reached that the free and open environment of the Internet sidelines the usual tediousness of academic publishing and begins to explore new answers to questions posed about the evaluation and ethics of performative social science. URN: urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs070338