A Hundred Years of Avant-Gardes

The Literary Experiment in Poland and Beyond 1917-2017

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For many Central-European countries, the inter- and post-war periods marked the beginning of their statehood and entailed the laying of the foundations for literary language itself. Experimental tendencies became a laboratory of bold and ambiguous visions of the world, inspiring many artists to join in the process of rebuilding their communities. Unlike other parts of the world, in Poland experiments thus conceived were not just about contesting bourgeois habits and forms, or testing the boundaries of social and aesthetic conventions. On the contrary, revolutionary-oriented circles supported the building of new centres of intellectual life, joined the cultural mainstream in the broadest possible sense, and, with time, became an important point of reference for the entire panorama of literary and artistic life.

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Katarzyna Bazarnik, PhD (D.Litt.) is professor in the Institute of English Philology of the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. Her research interests include materiality of literature, experimental and avant-garde writing, and Irish studies. She has published on James Joyce, B.S. Johnson, and liberature, an intermedial literary genre, combining text with the material form of the book (Lat. liber) into an integral whole.

Agnieszka Karpowicz, PhD (D.Litt.) is professor of the University of Warsaw, Poland. She is a specialist in literature and culture and member of the Centre for Avant-Garde Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow and Modernitas, the Maison des Sciences Humaines of the Université libre de Bruxelles.

Honorata Sroka, PhD is assistant professor at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences. She is the PI of several research projects and the author of articles on avant-garde archives, self-historicization and experimental life writing (projects funded by the National Science Centre Poland, the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange, the Centre français de recherche en sciences sociales and Charles University in Prague).

Paulina Chorzewska-Rubik, PhD is a research assistant at the Faculty of Philology of the University of Lodz. She is specializing in the connections between literature, new media, and internet culture. She is the principal investigator of the grant “Poem on the Web: Web Philology – The Example of Tomasz Pułka’s Creative Work (2005–2012),” funded by the National Science Centre, Poland, and affiliated with the University of Warsaw.

Jakub Kornhauser, PhD is assistant professor at the Faculty of Philology, Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. He is a literary scholar, poet, translator, essayist, editor and performer. He is the co-founder of the Avant-Garde Studies Center at the Faculty of Polish Studies, Jagiellonian University.
Contents
List of Figures and Tables

Introduction: the Literary Experiment in Poland 1917–2017

1 Pranas Morkūnas’ Morphophonological Poetry: Futurism, Dada and Politics
 Emiliano Ranocchi

2 Fundamentally Simple and Strictly Phonetical Spelling: the Orthographical Experiments of the Warsaw Futurists
 Marta Rakoczy

3 The Ear and the Eye: Visual Strategies of Avant-Garde Sound Poetry
 Beata Śniecikowska

4 ‘Littérature’ – le meilleur papier hygiénique du siècle: 75HP. and the Pursuit of Innovation and Syncretism in Romanian Avant-Garde in the 1920s
 Olga Bartosiewicz-Nikolaev

5 Experimenting with the Experiment: Engineering Re-invented in Multisensory Works by Franciszka and Stefan Themerson
 Beata Śniecikowska

6 Between a Poem, Happening and Performance: Jiří Kolář’s ‘Destatic Poetry’
 Żaneta Nalewajk-Turecka

7 The Book as a Material Object: the Concept in Owe Hyperbook in the Central European Neo Avant-Garde
 Jakub Kornhauser

8 Let the Poem Happen: the Sound in the Poetic Experience of the Yugoslav Avant-Gardes
 Magdalena Bogusławska

9 Poetical and Institutional Nomadism: Figures of In-betweenness in the Hungarian Neo-Avant-Garde
 Mónika Dánél

10 From Graphic Scores to Score-Poems: Notational Experiments of the Polish Neo-Avant-Garde (Bogusław Schaeffer – Witold Wirpsza)
 Piotr Bogalecki

11 Literature under the Knife and Eraser: Three Case Studies of Erasure Poetics (Racine – Foer – Mokry)
 Krzysztof Hoffmann

12 The Political Nature of Life-Writing Experiments
 Honorata Sroka

13 Literary Readymade? Experiment as Social Critique
 Agnieszka Karpowicz

14 Found Poems: from Anti-poetry to the Art of Subversion
 Jerzy Jarniewicz
 15 Encased History: Herta Müller’s Experimentation with Language, Image and Book Form in Der Wächter nimmt seinen Kamm  Katarzyna Bazarnik
 16 Experience of Distension, Materiality and Transparency: Zenon Fajfer’s DOWN as an Experimental Work of Liberature
 Przemysław Koniuszy

17 De-touched by the Writer: Zenon Fajfer’s Odlot as an Experiment in Space
 Katarzyna Biela

18 Vodka, Pizza and Alexa: Strategies of Appeal in Experimental Literature in Poland and Slovakia: From Liberature to AI Poetry
 Mariusz Pisarski

19 Poetry in the Social Media Interfaces
 Paulina Chorzewska-Rubik

20 Rainer, Playable Literature for the 8-Bit Atari: Technical Report on the Realization of a Digital Experiment
 Piotr Marecki, Krzysztof “Kaz” Ziembik and Tomasz “Tbxx” Boksa

21 Stalk-Stanzas: the Organic Nature of Experiment
 Marta Baron-Milian

22 An Experiment in Sign Language: Can There Be Experimentation in Sign Language Poetry?
 Marcin Demianiuk

Index of Names
academic institutes, art libraries, museums of contemporary art, specialists focused on avant-garde, neo-avant-garde and post-avant-garde, scholars focused on Central and Eastern European literatures and arts
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