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.
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.
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 âPoem on the Web: Web Philology â The Example of Tomasz PuÅkaâs Creative Work (2005â2012),â 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 1917â2017
1 Pranas MorkÅ«nasâ Morphophonological Poetry: Futurism, Dada and Politics
âEmiliano Ranocchi
2 Fundamentally Simple and Strictly Phonetical Spelling: the Orthographical Experiments of the Warsaw Futurists
âMarta Rakoczy
3 The Ear and the Eye: Visual Strategies of Avant-Garde Sound Poetry
âBeata Åniecikowska
10 From Graphic Scores to Score-Poems: Notational Experiments of the Polish Neo-Avant-Garde (BogusÅaw Schaeffer â Witold Wirpsza)
âPiotr Bogalecki
11 Literature under the Knife and Eraser: Three Case Studies of Erasure Poetics (Racine â Foer â Mokry)
âKrzysztof Hoffmann
12 The Political Nature of Life-Writing Experiments
âHonorata Sroka
13 Literary Readymade? Experiment as Social Critique
âAgnieszka Karpowicz
14 Found Poems: from Anti-poetry to the Art of Subversion
âJerzy Jarniewicz
â15âEncased History: Herta Müllerâs Experimentation with Language, Image and Book Form in Der Wächter nimmt seinen Kamm âKatarzyna Bazarnik
â16âExperience of Distension, Materiality and Transparency: Zenon Fajferâs DOWN as an Experimental Work of Liberature
âPrzemysÅaw Koniuszy
17 De-touched by the Writer: Zenon Fajferâs Odlot as an Experiment in Space
âKatarzyna Biela
18 Vodka, Pizza and Alexa: Strategies of Appeal in Experimental Literature in Poland and Slovakia: From Liberature to AI Poetry
âMariusz Pisarski
19 Poetry in the Social Media Interfaces
âPaulina Chorzewska-Rubik
20 Rainer, Playable Literature for the 8-Bit Atari: Technical Report on the Realization of a Digital Experiment
âPiotr Marecki, Krzysztof âKazâ Ziembik and Tomasz âTbxxâ Boksa
21 Stalk-Stanzas: the Organic Nature of Experiment
âMarta Baron-Milian
22 An Experiment in Sign Language: Can There Be Experimentation in Sign Language Poetry?
âMarcin 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