Closure of Conference project. Post-Conference Plans

Many many thanks to everyone who participated in the conference, to all those who presented papers, read their poetry or translations, contributed to discussions or just came to listen.

This blog will remain open as a record of the conference proceedings and will continue to include the programme, the abstracts of the presentations and the short biographies of the participants.

We have removed the conference papers from this site because we intend to include revised versions in a post-conference book. This book will not be a representation of the conference proceedings as such, however, but a volume of articles roughly reflecting the structure of the conference. The book will be edited by Ursula Philips, supported by a team of advisers (Urszula Chowaniec, Knut Andreas Grimstad, Kris Van Heuckelom and Elwira Grossman). It is expected that the volume will appear in 2013.

Should anyone wish to contact the authors of papers or read the original papers, please contact the conference organizer.

Sunday, July 03, 2011

Grzegorz Niziołek (Jagiellonian University, Kraków)

Patterns of Resentment

The experience of resentment has shaped nearly all the significant phenomena in Polish theatre and drama of the past two decades. The powerful political and cultural transformations which occurred shortly after 1989 froze the initial impact of this resentment and even negated its presence – the first suppression seemed to be quite successful, and to promise an unbroken transition from the old to the new. All the denied resentments erupted a few years later, considerably affecting Polish theatre and drama. As a result, patterns of resentment can be easily traced in major performances staged by Krystian Lupa, Krzysztof Warlikowski, Jan Klata and Monika Strzępka, and in plays written by Andrzej Stasiuk, Dorota Masłowska and Paweł Demirski. The experience of resentment forges their latent structures, becomes the object of attack or sympathy, provokes painful emotions, undermines the new ideologies and ridicules the old ones, and finally, provides readers and spectators with an instrument for critically approaching Polish history. This also expresses itself in a speciality of the Polish theatre, which is to evoke and depict the suffering of the humiliated body after it has been inscribed by resentment. Researching these phenomena takes us back to post-war Polish culture and its traumas, which have recently been revived through post-memory strategies, verging on both memory and history. The humiliated body has become the centre of the theatrical cosmos, and it is called on stage to speak out. The voice of resentment remains the most provocative strategy in Polish theatre and drama.