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My aim in this article is to look into manifestations of the corona crisis in theatre and performance as well as representations of other conflicts and problems, revealed or intensified by the pandemic. Drawing upon theories on the social influence of the pandemic developed by Snowden, Žižek and Neiman, I examine the potential of the pandemic theatre to critique and change the existing structures and to envision a more caring and considerate society. My analysis focuses on two British theatre projects: Inside/Outside: Six Short Plays (2021) and Isolated But Open: Voices from Across The Shutdown (2020) and their representations of the conflicted reality of the pandemic, addressing the questions of limitations and restrictions of rights and freedoms, on the one hand, and care and protection, on the other. The plays expose the conflicts between survival and life worth living, inside and outside, and the problems of the new normal and its life-changing potentials.

This article investigates the uses and appropriations of freak show strategies and esthetics in the Residents’ interactive project and album Freak Show. Drawing upon critical disability studies and...

This article outlines selected shifts in thinking about authorship and authority that have occurred in literary and cultural studies in the aftermath of Roland Barthes’s proclamation of the death of the author, followed by the author’s many revivals. Reconsidering Barthes’s seminal essay and confronting it with Michel Foucault’s query about the author-function, the article comments on Seán Burke’s polemical stance concerning situated authorship. Against these general considerations, several areas in which authorship and authority have been reconceptualized are briefly discussed, referring to the themes addressed in this volume. These areas embrace the problems of representing and using somebody else’s story in visual arts and testimonial theatre, the challenges of individual and cultural situatedness of writing within one’s own output and in reference to more general cultural hauntings as well as the processes of self-formation in the interactions between a variety of texts forming life-writing.

Referring to the discussion on the critical potential of dystopias in fiction, the article examines twentieth century feminist plays by Ann Jellicoe, Bryony Lavery and Germaine Greer for their presentation and critical deconstruction of gender roles, social structures and power relations. In the plays discussed in the article the critical and transgressive strategies used by the playwrights question the possibility of separating utopias and dystopias, showing how they are linked to and dependent on each other. Refusing to provide neat endings and definitions, the plays open up to contradictory readings by mixing the elements of dystopia and utopia and inviting critical and self-reflexive interpretations directing the critique of the past and the future towards the present.

THE HAUNTED CROSSROADS: LIBERIAN WARS AND TRANS-ATLANTIC TRAFFIC IN BLACK DIAMOND: THE YEARS THE LOCUSTS HAVE EATEN BY J. NICOLE BROOKS The article examines conflicted discourses and representations of the Liberian civil war and Liberian identities in the 2007 play Black Diamond by an American playwright and actress, J. Nicole Brooks. Its main objective is to investigate how the play endeavours to confront the complicated situation and history of Liberia, focusing on the colonial legacy of slave trade, displacement and recreation of settlement of American-Liberians in Africa, as well as the shifting political alliances and conflicts Liberia experiences nowadays. The play’s complexities and contradictions reflect the postcolonial relations between Liberian people and their land and expose the ties with and interference from the United States of America. The play discusses the ambiguous status of Liberians as both the colonizers and the colonized and shows the circulation of violence and domination, transforming homecoming into invasion. Black Diamond also asks questions about the ethics of representation, positioning vis-a-vis trauma and war and authorization to speak on behalf of others, problematized in scenes of hallucinations and hauntings. NAWIEDZONE SKRZYŻOWANIA: WOJNA DOMOWA W LIBERII I HANDEL TRANSATLANTYCKI W CZARNYM DIAMENCIE J. NICOLE BROOKS Artykul poświecony jest problemowi reprezentacji wojny domowej w Liberii i dyskusji na temat tozsamości Liberyjczykow podjetej w sztuce dramatycznej pt. Czarny Diament z 2007 roku, autorstwa amerykanskiej dramatopisarki i aktorki, J. Nicole Brooks. Glownym celem artykulu jest zbadanie strategii reprezentacji i dyskursow wykorzystanych w sztuce dla odzwierciedlenia zlozonej sytuacji i historii kraju, poczynając od dziedzictwa kolonializmu i handlu niewolnikami, poprzez problemy ponownego osadnictwa amerykanskich niewolnikow w Afryce, az po zmieniające sie uklady polityczne w czasach obecnych. Zlozona struktura sztuki, wraz z jej wewnetrznymi sprzecznościami, obrazuje skomplikowany stosunek Liberyjczykow do swojego kraju, na ktory dodatkowo silny wplyw wywierają relacje ze Stanami Zjednoczonymi. Dramat Brooks wskazuje na podwojny status Liberyjczykow jako zarowno kolonizatorow, jak i skolonizowanych, ukazując mechanizmy przemocy i dominacji, w ktorych powrot do domu po latach wygnania wydaje sie jednocześnie aktem inwazji. Sztuka Nicole Brooks stawia tez pytania o etyke reprezentacji, kwestie umiejscowienia podmiotu w stosunku do wydarzen traumatycznych i wojny, a takze porusza problem autoryzacji świadectwa wydarzen i wypowiadania sie w imieniu innych, ukazany w scenach halucynacji i nawiedzenia.

Edyta Lorek-Jezinska (PhD, D. Litt.) is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Nicolaus Copernicus University, Torun, Poland, where she teaches British drama, theatre, gender and cultural studies. She has published on site and environment in theatre as well as gender, intertextuality, corporeality and hauntology in British drama. She is the author of The Hybrid in the Limen: British and Polish Environment-Oriented Theatre (2003, Torun) and Hauntology and Intertextuality in Contemporary British Drama by Women Playwrights (2013, Torun).

This article presents the major aspects of hauntology, highlighting the impact of spectrality studies on contemporary redefnitions of knowledge and cognition. Referring predominantly to Jacques Derrida’s Spectres de Marx (1993), we discuss the ways in which the spectral turn has led to a “cognitive crisis” of sorts by radically questioning the existing procedures of knowing and re-confguring the prevalent conceptualization of time and history. Approaching the spectre as a conceptual site of difference and otherness, we comment on the ethical dimensions of spectrality studies and the questions of (in)visibility, representation of as well as responsibility for the Other, the marginalised or the silenced. We also stress the contribution of the psychoanalytic concepts explaining psychological reactions to loss—the metapsychic phantom and the intrapsychic crypt—to the development of trauma and memory studies. In all of these concerns, we are primarily interested in outlining the transformative potential of the fgure of the spectre and its influence on methods of study in contemporary scholarship.

The objective of the present paper is to examine the two contrastive yet interconnected processes activated in parody: conservative and revolutionary. The conservative drive is associated with the continuation and reinforcement of the parodied original while the revolutionary drive refers to the transgressive and critical potential of the parodic text, often realised in mockery, satire or deconstruction. Her Aching Heart by Bryony Lavery, a parody of a Gothic romance, displays both of these tendencies, which in their interplay and opposition lead to the point of the cultural disruption in an attempt at lesbian representation. The parody of the Gothic historical romance in Her Aching Heart is performed through exaggeration, replacement and experiment in gender roles distribution. With the Gothic romance’s heavy dependence on clear gender oppositions, Lavery’s exploration of the same-sex casting, multiple role-playing, and cross-dressing necessarily and subversively redefines the genre’s formula, leading to the point of its disintegration. In this respect, the play can be classified as selfparodic and self-referential. Its interest lies in questioning the possibility of representation of alternative forms of love within as well as without the convention of romance, and thus indirectly searching for the possibility of formulating alternative lesbian dramaturgy. Udostępnienie publikacji Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego finansowane w ramach projektu „Doskonałość naukowa kluczem do doskonałości kształcenia”. Projekt realizowany jest ze środków Europejskiego Funduszu Społecznego w ramach Programu Operacyjnego Wiedza Edukacja Rozwój; nr umowy: POWER.03.05.00-00-Z092/17-00.

Deborah Levy’s Macbeth—False Memories (2000) addresses the transitional millennial crisis of identity and integrity, fuelled by postmodern uncertainties and deconstructions. Its major concern is the concept of authenticity and forgery, the original and the copy, partly conveyed through the play’s problematic relation to Shakespeare’s Macbeth. In her version, Levy seems to be interested in exploring the cultural fragmented memories of Shakespeare’s text, inaccurate, imprecise and detached from the original context. The author herself comments in the introduction to her play that her Macbeth “explores how a story told five hundred years ago travels into the concrete, pollution and speed of the twenty-first century”. One of the essential transformations that occur in Levy’s version is the redefinition of the motivation for murder. The original Macbeth’s desire for power is replaced with Levy’s characters’ search for authenticity of experience and feeling which they hope to gain in the act of murder. The possibility of achieving authenticity through murder is destroyed by the play’s intrinsic meta-and inter-textuality which in a self-referential metaphor equates murder with acting and compares a murderer to an actor, who is always a forger of somebody else. Levy’s characters’ imprisonment in fakeness and lack of authenticity is largely defined by their bondage to Shakespeare’s text, which preconditions all their actions.

Artykuł podejmuje temat brytyjskich obchodów setnej rocznicy I wojny światowej, a w szczególności znaczenia interaktywnych projektów teatralnych i artystycznych w konstruowaniu i reaktywowaniu traumy kulturowej. Artykuł ma na celu zbadanie strategii włączania młodego pokolenia w obchody i rytuały pamięci, które polegają na pośredniej mobilizacji uczestników do współczucia, empatii oraz gotowości pośredniczenia w przekazie traumy. W ten sposób jubileuszowy trzeci boom pamięci odtwarza nieistniejące już lub osłabione relacje pokoleniowe wcześniejszych fal kolektywnej pamięci o I wojnie światowej, włączając w ten proces grupy społeczne wcześniej pominięte lub wykluczone. Lorek-Jezińska examines British celebrations of the centenary of World War I in interactive theatre and artistic projects, focusing on their function in constructing and reviving the cultural trauma. She investigates strategies for including the younger generation in centenary celebrations and commemorations – strategies based on mobilizing participants’ compassion, empathy and readiness to become the medium of testimony. In this way the third memory boom stimulated by the centenary revives the intergenerational relations that formed the basis of the earlier World War I memory boom, additionally including social groups that had previously been disregarded or excluded from this process.