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The article presents the spectralisation of lesbian desire, i.e., the discursive production of the social invisibility of lesbians, through its presentation in two podcasts: Midnight Radio (2018) by Bobbie Parker and Weaver (2021) written and performed by Newton Sweeney. The issue of spectralisation combines uncanny studies with queer theory, developing the concept of the queer subject as a phantom emerging in heteronormative culture through the social repression of queerness (the process known as homo-spectrality). In this context, the podcast format is particularly interesting as a derivative of radio, a medium historically predisposed to telling ghost stories (or conveying the voice of a ghost). The analyzed titles illustrate the social mechanism of spectralisation and offer a significant reinterpretation, as they base the production of the spectre not on the psychological mechanism of repression but on the desire for preservation, maintenance, and love. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses Grzegorz Uzdański's verse novel Wypiór (2021, the title is a pun on the word 'upiór', Pol. spectre) which is multifaceted commentary on the Romantic tradition and the 'Romantic paradigm', epitomized in the figure of Adam Mickiewicz transformed into a vampire. The pop-cultural frame invites the reader to pursue all kinds of links between Wypiór and the gallery of the living dead, ghosts and spectres in Mickiewicz's stories (conceived both as characters from the past and a metaphoric projections of the Romantic poet). The article compares the references and allusions in Uzdański's novel to Mickiewicz's own text as well as the text of another contemporary comic horror novel, Ale razem z naszymi umarłymi (But Not Without Our Dead) by Jacek Dehnel. The analyses, which rely on a methodological toolkit inspired by Jacques Derrida's hauntology, offer a more accurate reading of Wypiór and highlight its place in the contemporary reception of Romanticism with its predilection for haunting, ghosts or persistent spectral presence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The concept of hauntology, created by Jacques Derrida, reveals new meanings of those literary works whose essence are liminal places, that are binding the past and the present and former and present tenants with the yoke of crime. Such places include both the crypt from The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) by Edgar Allan Poe and the basement from the novel Domofon [The Intercom] (2005) by Zygmunt Miłoszewski. These become places where spectres live. Both works are connected by the aesthetics of Gothicism, a gloomy houses visited by a stranger, the frail mental and physical condition of the inhabitants, the motifs of painting, the gradually discovered history of the locations, hiding some dark tragedy and, above all, the underground part of the building, inhabited by spectral female figures demanding justice for the wrongs suffered. The ghostly perspective allows us to distinguish in the construction of the presented world the traumatic moment when the ghost has been born (the story of the haunted palace, Marianna’s tragedy), the place haunted by it (the catacombs of the estate, the basement of the block of flats) and the type of manifestation of the ghostly figure (vampiric Lady Usher, beautiful Marianna) along with the way it affects the characters (apparent madness, apathy, the motif of surviving the night). The endings of both works are parallel, when the buildings tremble in their foundations, and also by symbolical union of the Usher twins, that in Miłoszewski’s text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is devoted to the Polish translation of Kućni duhovi [Home Ghosts], a collection of short stories by Dubravka Ugrešić, her only book addressed to the youngest readers which has been published outside Croatia. The study focuses on the issue of cultural strangeness generated mostly by proper names that appear in the stories: ghosts’ names, and the names and surnames of other characters. In her translation, Dorota Jovanka Ćirlić domesticated the source text, replacing all of them with Polish equivalents. The comparative analysis presented in this article considers translation strategies she used and illustrates them with numerous examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]