ABSTRACTS OF CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS

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PLENARY SPEAKERS

Mark Jackson

University of Bristol

Mark Jackson is a Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial Geographies at the University of Bristol,

UK. He is the editor of a new book, Coloniality, Ontology, and the Question of the Posthuman

(Routledge, 2018). His recent papers have appeared in the journals Progress in Human

Geography, Geohumanities, and The Singapore Journal of Tropical Geographies, and he has

contributed forthcoming book chapters on political ontology and decolonial thought to The

Sage Handbook of Nature 3rd Ed (SAGE) and Feelings of Structure: Explorations in Affect

(McGill-Queens UP).

Decolonising Critique and the Ontological Care of Incommensurability

How the human is imagined as limited is fundamental to the meaning and work of critique.

Indeed, it is because the human is considered to be ineluctably limited that critique, since at

least the work of Kant, is understood to be necessary; being critical is being aware of

constitutive limits. Orthodox critical theories of politics and ethics, therefore, often construct

the challenge of critique as enmeshed within negotiating the struggles that shape human

limits (i.e. language, history, culture, etc.). Recent decolonial and posthumanist thinking,

however, is challenging these now well-honed assumptions. Drawing from decolonial and

posthumanist analysis, this paper argues that contemporary efforts towards affirmative

ethics, which demand that we re-think how limits are imagined must also attend to the

meaning of critique. Simply claiming critique and creativity as affirmative virtues merely

begs the question of what it means to be critical. The paper suggests that respite to this

problem may be found in a political ontology of care. Care and vulnerability can constitute in

a shared recognition of flourishing that moves beyond the problematics of humanist limits

and struggles. Care, it is argued, may be a relational means to affirm the becoming-together

that regards life as the acknowledgement of shared more-than-human vulnerability. Care, or

an attention to constitutive vulnerability, becomes, then, the condition of negotiation.

Struggle over limits is but one feature of criticality - an important feature, but not the only

one. We need, as well, a relational ontology of vulnerability that shapes the negotiation of

translation, limitation, and incommensurability. The source of this affirmation is ontological,

rather than simply an epistemically insurmountable problem; care is a condition of thought.

The paper ends with a brief analysis of the implications for critique when care as shared

ontological vulnerability is a ground for understanding incommensurability, and politics

more generally.

Dorota Kołodziejczyk

Wrocław University, Poland

Dr. Dorota Kołodziejczyk, Assistant Professor, Institute of English Studies, Wrocław

University. Co-founder of Research Center for Postcolonial and Posttotalitarian Studies,

Wrocław University, board member of Postdependence Studies Center, Warsaw University.

Her recent research focuses on new cosmopolitanisms, methodologies in literary and cultural

comparison, intellectual disability and citizenship/human rights. Recent publications: (with

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Cristina Şandru) Postcolonial Perspectives on Postcommunism in Central and Eastern

Europe, Routledge, 2016. Translator and translation editor of Postcolonial Theory.

Outside or beyond the human? Autism in J.M. Coetzee and Doris Lessing.

Representing that which cannot speak in its own name has been a major ethical challenge in

literature, and especially so in postcolonial studies. I want to discuss an especial instance of

subalternity that in postcolonial studies has been so far largely overlooked – the autistic

subject marginalized for his/her racial/ethnic belonging, or for the sheer strangeness to even

the closest kin. Such character is also devoid of the possibility of negotiating his/her position

of subalternity precisely because of the inability to express themselves, and to work through

their potentially traumatic experience. In J.M. Coetzee’s novels (Foe, The Times and Life of

Michael K.) an autistic character blocks any narratives of recuperation and healing. This

blockage puts into perspective attempts to alleviate the fate of these marginalized, possibly

traumatized, in all ways victimized, characters. What seems highly ethical, like e.g. helping

them – may be absolutely the reverse – unethical, appropriating, colonizing, geared mostly

toward a pleasurable narrative of self-recognition rather than feasible help.

Coetzee’s explorations of the state outside of speech and the social bring him to

considerations of humanity of these characters. The dehumanizing discourse, prioritizing

language as a distinctively human feature, locates the autistic and intellectually impaired

character in the indeterminate zone of the lack (of language, of social skills, of abstraction).

In Coetzee’s novels this situation is not recuperated by narrative strategies, but, rather, the

privileged status of language as that which defines the human is challenged here. And not

because the autistic characters are represented as human outside of the language and the

social, but because they are represented as possibly non-human, if the human is that which

separates itself from nature.

In Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child, the autistic boy, represented as the very embodiment of

otherness – alien affectively, socially and as species (respectively - a monster, animal, and

pre-human), likewise challenges our sense of the human. In the sequel to the novel, Ben, in

the World, Lessing was trying to amend the negative representation of Ben from the previous

novel. But my interest is less to assess Lessing’s bias in using a disabled character to

represent monstrosity (a very old phenomenon in literature and culture), but to link her

explorations in the non-human with Coetzee’s writing.

Reading the two authors comparatively, I want to investigate how the non-human develops

in these narratives from its function of social stigma and negativity to the space of inter-

species negotiations that surpass the hierarchy of human/non-human. Animal studies and

ecocriticism offer interesting insights into methods of investigating intellectual and

psychosocial disability not only as a tool for social criticism but also as a way to think about

the human in a more open, less hierarchical, way.

John Thieme

University of East Anglia

John Thieme is a Senior Fellow at the University of East Anglia. He previously held Chairs at

the University of Hull and London South Bank University and has also taught at the

Universities of Guyana and North London. His books include Postcolonial Con-Texts:

Writing Back to the Canon, Postcolonial Literary Geographies: Out of Place, studies of

Derek Walcott, V.S. Naipaul and R.K. Narayan, and The Arnold Anthology of Post-Colonial

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Literatures in English. He was Editor of The Journal of Commonwealth Literature from

1992 to 2011 and is General Editor of the Manchester University Press Contemporary World

Writers Series. His creative writing has been published in Argentina, Canada, Hong Kong,

India, Italy, Malaysia, the Netherlands, the UK and the USA. A selection of his work is

available on his academia.edu page.

Beyond ‘The Calculus of Probability’: Environment and Ecopoetics in Novels by

Amitav Ghosh and Margaret Atwood

In his 2016 book, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Amitav

Ghosh offers a probing account of forces that threaten environmental disaster for the planet.

He argues that beliefs about climate that rely on ‘the calculus of probability’, the view that

meteorological changes occur gradually, have become unsustainable: the recent proliferation

of extreme weather-related events has made the hitherto improbable the new norm. He also

takes the view that the realist novel is unsuited to the representation of dramatic

climatological events, arguing that ‘Within the pages of a novel an event that is only slightly

improbable in real life may seem wildly unlikely: the writer will have to work hard to make it

appear persuasive.’ This paper compares Ghosh’s response to environmental issues in The

Great Derangement and two of his novels, The Circle of Reason (1986) and The Hungry Tide

(2004), with the politics and poetics of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian MaddAddam trilogy

(2003-13). In doing so, it attempts to assess the viability of his comments on the ecopoetics of

the novel.

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PRESENTATIONS IN PARALLEL SESSIONS

Joanna Antoniak

Nicolaus Copernicus University, Poland

Joanna Antoniak is a PhD student at the Department of English, NCU. Her academic

interests include postmodernism, postcolonial studies and men and masculinities, in

particular the portrayal of fatherhood in diasporic communities and the complexity of

borders and borderlines in the context of diasporas.

Butterflies, moths, and peacocks – the connection between the postcolonial and

the environmental in Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers (2004) Session 4

Aslam’s 2004 novel Maps for Lost Lovers focuses predominantly on experiences of the

members of Pakistani and Indian diasporas in the United Kingdom, their alienation,

rootlessness, self-imposed isolation from the British society, and longing for their abandoned

homeland; at the same time, though, Aslam uses strong animal and plant symbolism to

reflect the struggles of the members of the diaspora and their relationships with each other

and the outside world. The changing of seasons reflects the internal change in Shamas, the

protagonist of the novel. The delicateness of butterflies and moths and their constant

movement come to symbolise Jungu’s – Shamas’ brother – life and relationships with people

he meets, presenting to the audience his strong environmental identity. The aim of this

presentation is to discuss how in Maps for Lost Lovers Aslam draws the connection between

the postcolonial and the environmental and how this connection manifests itself in the

characters and their environmental identity.

Olga Antsyferova

Siedlce University of Natural Sciences and Humanities (Faculty of Humanities), Poland

Olga Antsyferova (Dr. Hab, full professor) is currently a Professor of Anglophone Literature

in the Faculty of Humanities at Siedlce University (Poland). She authored three full-length

studies and a large number of essays on US and British literature published, among others, in

The Henry James Review and American Studies International. She obtained her Doctoral

degree from Moscow State University (2002). For about thirty years she taught foreign

literature at Ivanovo State University (Russia). She was a Fulbright scholar at the University

of Southern California, Irvine (1999-2000) and also gained research grants from different

educational foundations.

Problematizing Humannes, Anticipating Posthumansim: Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Session 7

Written in 1968, the sci-fi novel by the American author Philip K. Dick Do Androids Dream

of Electric Sheep? still holds the interest of a wide reading audience. The paper aims at

analyzing reasons for this lasting public enthusiasm[,] which is claimed to relate not only to

extremely successful film-versions of the book, but, even more so, to the highly topical

message of the book. In his antiutopian text, Philip K. Dick manages to put into focus the

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whole range of issues currently associated with posthumanism, a term coined several decades

later. These are environmental problems caused by human activities, interplanetary

colonization escalating the conflicts of inclusion/exclusion, human/animal relations

overlapping with the hybridization of natural and artificial and with reconsidering the

conventional social values, futuristic problems of technological posthumanism manifesting

themselves in highly problematic distinction between the humans and androids and in

questioning the onto-ethical status of the humans. Philip K. Dick explores philosophical,

social and religious underpinnings of the catastrophic future which lies in wait for humanity

and seems to strongly adhere to such humanistic values as empathy (the main touchstone to

differentiate between humans and androids), self-reflection (the predominant feature of the

protagonist Rick Deckard), search for identity and search for meaning as the principal

vectors of the human life, as well as mercy for the mentally handicapped. Philip K. Dick’s

book can be viewed as one of the earliest warnings against the emerging trend to reconsider

humanness in the sociocultural context of rapidly developing technology, against various

environmental threats, all kinds of hybridization and their ethical repercussions — and as

such the book can be seen as truly prognostic, the most valuable part of it to be found in its

ethical and social awareness and highly conscious refusal to put forward any final answer:

essentially, the titled question seems eristically unanswerable.

Peter Arnds

Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

Peter Arnds, FTCD, Head of Italian, has served as Head of German and the Director of

Comparative Literature and Literary Translation at Trinity College Dublin. His book

publications include monographs on Wilhelm Raabe, Charles Dickens, Günter Grass, wolves

in literature, and Translating Holocaust Literature. The author of numerous short stories and

poetry, he has translated a Swiss novel (Rapids, nominated for IMPAC), and his novel

Searching for Alice is forthcoming. In 2015 he was awarded membership by the PEN Centre

for German Writers Abroad. He is currently working on a large research project in the

Environmental Humanities and another novel entitled Detachment.

The War on Wolves and Natives: Race, Migration, and Environmental Politics in the US

Session 8

In the British colonies the wolf was an image for the colonized Other. In the American

settlements wolves and the indigenous were associated with one another as ‘creatures of the

godless wilderness’ which the colonists had a moral duty to subdue. In the clash of

civilizations between Europe and the indigenous world the wolf is a densely political animal

in discourses of nationalism, colonialism, territory, migration, genocide, and

environmentalism. The wolf is located at the intersection of migration on the one hand, and

the protection of home, territory, and the nation-state on the other, a scenario that makes

evident that indigenous cultures tend to view the wolf very differently from European ones.

My proposed paper will analyse by way of literary texts such as Jack London’s Call of the

Wild, Michael Blake’s Dances With Wolves, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing how the

wolf is imagined in the context of migration, indigeneity, and the environment. The objective

is further to find out if Native American perceptions of nature, land use, and the wolf in

literature correspond to the contemporary reality of indigenous views, to what extent Native

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American literature plays with the same stereotypes as the European colonizers, or if there is

an indigenous world view that can fruitfully inform the politics of migration and race, and a

trajectory from exclusion to inclusion. How does the brotherhood of human and wolf

portrayed in Native American myths survive into our (post)-colonial, post-humanist times?

Without intending to romanticize the ‘noble savage’ my paper examines the current politics

in the US regarding wolves, the indigenous and immigration in light of a text such as John G.

Neihardt’s classic Black Elk Speaks (1932) and its message that the land cannot be owned by

any one creature but instead owns all living things. How do such worldviews correspond to

our own European cultural heritage, such as Immanuel Kant’s concept of world peace (1795),

which propagates that our planet be shared by all and that consequently refugees have an

innate right of being given shelter in nations other than the ones they were born into?

Patrycja Austin

University of Rzeszów, Poland

Patrycja Austin is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of English Studies, Rzeszów

University, where she teaches English and postcolonial literature. In her current research she

is attempting to combine postcolonial theory with ecocriticism in the reading of

contemporary authors. She is a member of ASLE.

Jeff VanderMeer’s itinerant landscape: The Southern Reach Trilogy Session 4

In this paper I analyze Jeff VanderMeer’s 2014 eco sci-fi Southern Reach Trilogy. In the

imaginative Area X the boundary between the human and nonhuman is blurred as plants and

animals display human characteristics while human protagonists undergo transmutations

that merge them with the natural environment. Area X can be read in terms of Timothy

Morton’s hyperobjects as, even though it impacts the protagonists, it remains elusive. The

novels also respond to new findings in biology pertaining to the intelligence of plants by

exploring ways of communicating beyond the human language.

Łukasz Barciński


Obtained a PhD in linguistics (literary translation) at University of Rzeszów in 2015.

Assistant professor in the Section of the Theory of Translation, Institute of English Studies,

University of Rzeszów. Also, a translator of specialist (legal, business) and literary texts (e.g.

The Cruelest Cut by Rick Reed). Scope of research: postmodern, postcolonial and

experimental literature; performance studies; poststructuralism and contemporary

translatology. Selected publications: A study of postmodern literature in translation as

illustrated through the selected works of Thomas Pynchon (2016).

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Posthumanism in translation as illustrated by the Polish rendition of Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon

Session 9

The presentation will explore posthuman themes in Bleeding Edge, a novel by Thomas

Pynchon, a postmodern American writer. In the book, the female detective, Maxine Tarnow,

endeavours to comprehend a society disrupted by a new type of social stagnation related to

the control of information flow. Ruled by the new paradigms of posthumanity and trauma,

Pynchon's characters are woven in the rhizomatic networks of terrorism and web addiction.

Ultimately, the presentation will analyse key fragments related to posthumanism to show to

what extent this aspect is recreated in the Polish rendition of Pynchon's work and by means

of which translation strategy (domestication vs. foreignisation).

Olha Dovbush

Ternopil National Pedagogical University, Ukraine

Olha Dovbush, Assisstant Professor of English Philology Department, has been teaching

English to the students of the Foreign Languages Department (FLD) of Ternopil Volodymyr

Hnatyuk National Pedagogical University since 2002. Having started her career as a Speech

Practice and English Grammar instructor, she is now a qualified lecturer in English

Literature and Stylistics for FLD undergraduates as well as Critical Approach to Literature

and Academic Writing for Master's students. Olha Dovbush received her PhD in

Comparative Literature Studies in 2010 for the carried out research into the nature of Intra-

and Intersemiotic Translation. Her future research interests include intersemiotic

translation, transnational literary issues and popular culture.

What do Animals Dream about? An Eco-ethical Perspective on Barbara Kingsolver's Animal Dreams

Session 6

For thousands of years, people actively interfered with nature, without thinking about

maintaining equilibrium in it; a situation particularly complicated in the 20th century, when

in the process of scientific and technological revolution, the anthropogenic impact on the

environment has been sharply amplified. Due to the growth of the population on Earth,

active industrialization, urbanization and intensive human activities, environmental systems

have reduced their ability to self-purify and rehabilitate. In a relationship between man and

nature there has been a crisis that has caused global problems. The unfolding environmental

disaster increases the need for taking evasive actions.

Ecocriticism is a reaction to the global problems of humanity, aimed at increasing the

ecological consciousness, literacy and culture of the world community. The purpose of the

new literary trend is to carry out education through works on environmental topics and

promote the reestablishment of the connection between man and nature. Ecocritics tend to

rethink the famous works of world literature from the eco-centric perspective, emphasizing

the representation of the world of nature in them. The advocates of eco-theory appeal to

writers who dedicate a great deal of their work to the environment, thus reorienting the

readership world from anthropocentrism to an alternative type.

The principles of ecocriticism are reflected in the novel "Animal Dreams", attracting the

attention of readers to environmental problems (preservation of natural resources, pollution

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of the environment, peace, health etc.), which arose in an era of scientific and technological

progress. The book aims at carrying out ecological education among children, which will

ensure a responsible and respectful attitude towards the environment and respect for the

moral and legal principles of nature management.

Beata Kiersnowska


Beata Kiersnowska is an associate professor in the Institute of English Studies at the

University of Rzeszów (Poland). She graduated from the Institute of English Studies at Maria

Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin and also holds a post-graduate diploma in British

history and culture from Warsaw University and Ruskin College, Oxford. Her academic

interests include British history and culture. She specialises in the Victorian period and has

analysed different aspects of Victorian culture in several published articles and her doctoral

dissertation. Her main research area is leisure studies.

From the garden city to eco-urbanism and community gardening Session 8

The paper aims to discuss the legacy of the Garden City movement in contemporary Britain

as part of the Western trend towards eco-urbanism and urban sustainability. The Garden City

idea proposed and developed by Ebenezer Howard in 1898 grew out of the concerns for the

amelioration of life in overcrowded and congested working-class neighbourhoods in late-

Victorian cities. Informed by socialist concerns for the welfare of the working masses and the

growing awareness of the impact of environmental degradation on the mental and physical

condition of human beings, the movement culminated in the appearance of Letchworth and

Welwyn, the first towns built according to Howard’s principles. These new urban

developments were supposed to marry the best the country and the city had to offer. A

century later, the challenges posed by climate change and resource constraint, environmental

awareness and adherence to a new ‘green’ lifestyle as well as the nostalgia for small-

community lifestyle became widely shared social values. They created a climate for

rediscovering and re-examining the garden city tradition, gathering momentum with the

progress of the new community movement in Britain. The appropriation of selected elements

of Howard’s scheme gave rise to numerous community projects such as beekeeping and

community gardening initiatives which enhanced community bonds by involving its

members in shared activities and presenting them with common goals.

Lidia Kniaź

Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Poland

Lidia Kniaź is a doctoral student at Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin, Poland,

and a 2016 winner of the 2nd Prize in Poland’s contest for the Best MA Thesis in American

Studies. Her research interests include science fiction music videos, Afrofuturism, and sound

design in film. She is currently working on her dissertation on Afrofuturist music videos.

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Navigating the Plasticscape: the Anthropocene in Numbers Photographed by Chris Jordan

Session 10

Irmgard Emmelhainz (2015) in one of her articles defines the Anthropocene as the era in

which “man’s impact on the earth has become the single force driving change on the planet,

thus giving shape to nature, shifting seas, changing the climate, and causing the

disappearance of innumerable species, including placing humanity on the brink of

extinction.” The human impact on the planet as one of topics most frequently addressed in

ecocriticism is also of interest to visual artists, willing to illustrate issues affecting the world.

Contemporary “artivists” are increasingly gearing their attention towards the subject of the

Anthropocene to create a sense of urgency to take action and stop humanity from taking such

steps that would have irreversible consequences on both the environment and the

generations to come.

In my presentation I intend to analyze the photography of Chris Jordan, an acclaimed digital

photography artist, in the context of present-day environmental concerns. I want to explore

the relation between photography and the environment in the Age of Man and show the

limits of the human perceived as the limits of the consumerist Western lifestyle, which are

addressed by Jordan. I am going to analyze Jordan’s selected collections, namely “Running

the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait (2006 - Current)”, “Running the Numbers II:

Portraits of Global Mass Culture (2009 - Current)”, and “Intolerable Beauty: Portraits of

American Mass Consumption (2003 - 2005)” using the framework of eco-critical thought and

the theory of hyperobjects by Timothy Morton (2013). Finally, I am also going to “read”

selected artworks through the framework of glitch art theory explored by Rosa Menkman

(2013) and Michael Betancourt (2009; 2016).

Sławomir Kozioł


Sławomir Kozioł, PhD, is presently a senior lecturer at the University of Rzeszów, Poland. He

has published a monograph on representations of social space in the twentieth-century

British novel, as well as a number of scholarly articles dealing with pop culture, new media

art and representations of art in fiction. His recent academic interests also include science-

fiction and post-humanism.

What can a wiser sister teach you? Pressure for social media activity in Dave

Eggers’s The Circle Session 7

Dave Egger’s The Circle, set in the United States of the near future, represents a society

completely dominated by a social media platform called the Circle. Mae, the main character

of the novel, works for the Circle and considers it to be the epitome of technological and

social progress. However, as her own social media activity is far below the level expected from

employees of the company, Mae is offered a part in an experimental programme supposed to

stimulate her engagement in social media by teaching her to value her own opinions on

virtually everything of commercial worth. Wearing a headphone and a microphone all day

long, Mae is supposed to answer daily at least five hundred questions asked by a special

computer program. When the program decides that she is too slow in answering the

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questions, it reminds her of the task with a prompt, regardless of whether she is doing

anything else at the moment or not – thus Mae is supposed to answer the questions also

during other activities. The prompt has a form of her own name spoken in her own, slightly

modified voice – when Mae hears it for the first time she imagines that it could be spoken by

her older and wiser sister.

The paper will examine the figure of the wiser sister on several levels, using theoretical

frameworks developed by psychology, post-phenomenology and the theory of the extended

self. As a result, the paper will argue that the prompt may be seen as a figurative

representation of a virtually ceaseless pressure on users to engage in social media activities.

Ruth K. Lévai

University of Miskolc, Hungary

Ruth Karin Lévai obtained her BA in German and French language and literature from

Pepperdine University in Malibu, California. She also holds an MA in Russian philology from

Lomonosov Moscow State University. She is currently a Ph.D. student in comparative

literature at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary as well as a lecturer in English

and German language and literature at the University of Miskolc in northeastern Hungary.

She has previously published in Christianity & Literature (2005), Slavonica (2014) and

CLCWeb (2016). Ms. Lévai has presented at conferences in Hungary, Paris, Toronto and

Wolverhampton, UK.

Re-imagining the limits of reason: authority, infinity and relationship in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred

Session 6

Traditional Enlightenment thought presumed reason’s ability to supersede the time-space

continuum. It amounted to what contemporary French philosopher Jean-Luc Marion calls

“conceptual idolatry”: “Nothing less than the destiny of Being—or, better, Being as destiny—

mobilizes conceptual idolatry and assures it a precise function.” It was this conceptual

idolatry which fuelled the fire of colonialism and enabled the moral justification of all its

varied forms. My paper will explore how American author Harriet Beecher Stowe’s faith in

the authority of relationship led her to reject reason as ultimate authority and to instead see

its primary role as an indicator of infinity. In this understanding truth ceased to be one of

objectivity alone and became first and foremost one of subjectivity, yet not the subjectivity of

the ego but of relationship. The glorification of human existence within time and space as the

foundation of reality had led to a love of institutions, “…which come at last to stand…in the

place of God,” as Stowe wrote in the notes for her novel The Minister’s Wooing, a criticism

of patriarchal power. Her recognition that, “…the Christian religion…does not think God

starting from the cause, or within the theoretical space defined by metaphysics, or even

starting from the concept, but indeed starting from God alone,” (Jean-Luc Marion, The

Essential Writings, 64) kept her from falling victim to that hubris of the idolater, the reversal

of the vectors of significance, as described by Vilém Flusser in the twentieth century. God,

understood as being, and being, understood as happiness, and happiness, understood as

prosperity, had effaced the memory of relationship. She endeavoured, “… to pose a radically

democratic alternative to feudal and clerical structures. The hierarchical institutions Stowe

attacked depended on separations between the public and the private, head and heart, the

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system makers and the victims of systems.” (Joan Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life,

279)

Tadeusz Lewandowski

University of Opole, Poland

Dr hab. Tadeusz Lewandowski is an American associate professor and head of the

Department of American Literature and Culture at the University of Opole, Poland. He is the

author of Red Bird, Red Power: The Life and Legacy of Zitkala-Ša (University of Oklahoma

Press) and editor of Zitkala-Ša: Letters, Speeches, and Unpublished Writings, 1898–1929

(Brill).

Zitkala-Ša’s Critique of Euro-American Attitudes to the Environment Session 3

In her critiques of Euro-American society, the Yankton Sioux writer and activist Zitkala-Ša

(1876–1938) had much to say about environmental identity, responsibility, the nature-

culture binary, and the environmental impact of technology and war. This perspective was

formed over a lifetime of moving between traditional indigenous modes of existence and

modern U.S. society. Though separated from her tribe at age eight and educated at white-run

boarding schools, Zitkala-Ša spent her life criticizing not only Euro-American colonialism,

but white environmental stewardship of North America—which she argued was marked by

rank exploitation and a technological assault borne of greed for material wealth. This flawed

cultural attitude toward nature had resulted in the near-extinction of the American bison, the

Gold Rush despoliation of the California landscape, and ultimately the First World War.

Aside from addressing these issues openly in various periodicals, Zitkala-Ša’s book, Old

Indian Legends (1901), as well subtly dwelled on Sioux identity’s symbiotic relationship with

nature. Ultimately, for Zitkala-Ša white disrespect toward the environment was directly tied

to both white individualism, and a disregard for communal values that encompassed the

natural world its creatures. The result was alienation not only from nature, but one’s fellow

humans. This paper will survey Zitkala-Ša’s writings on these matters, suggesting that her

critique touches on what it means to be human in a manner deserving of some reflection.

Robin MacKenzie

University of St Andrews, Scotland

Robin MacKenzie started academic life as a specialist in modern (post-1850) French fiction,

publishing a monograph and a number of articles on the work of Marcel Proust, as well as

essays on Mérimée, Fromentin and Julien Gracq. His current research interests lie primarily

in comparative literature: recent publications include articles on ecological themes in novels

by Lawrence Norfolk and Christoph Ransmayr, and the fiction of contemporary Scottish

writer Christopher Whyte. He is currently Honorary Lecturer in the School of Modern

Languages at St Andrews University and a General Editor of the journal Forum for Modern

Language Studies.

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A Very Fretful Porpentine: Writing the Animal in Alain Mabanckou’s Memoirs of a Porcupine

Session 1

‘Postcolonial studies has shown little interest in the fate of the nonhuman animal’: Philip

Armstrong, in his seminal article on ‘The Postcolonial Animal’ (2002), describes in

uncompromising fashion the tensions that have traditionally existed between postcolonial

theory and animal studies. More recent scholarship has presented a more nuanced and

complex picture of the relationship between these two areas of research in the wake of the

‘animal turn’ in humanities and social sciences, as exemplified in essay collections such as

Creatural Fictions, edited by David Herman (2016), and Indigenous Creatures, Native

Knowledges and the Arts, edited by Wendy Woodward and Susan McHugh (2017).

Drawing on the work of these scholars and of thinkers in the field of animal studies such as

Kate Soper, Cary Wolfe and Élisabeth de Fontenay, I will discuss some aspects of the literary

representation of non-human animals and their relationship with human beings, taking as a

case study and starting point for comparison the novel Memoirs of a Porcupine by Congolese

writer Alain Mabanckou (first published in French as Mémoires de porc-épic in 2006). By

examining techniques and devices such as Mabanckou’s adoption of a first-person narrative

voice (thus ‘impersonating’ the eponymous porcupine), the distinctive rhythm and syntax

that characterises this voice, and the mobilisation of traditional motifs (in this instance the

figure of the animal double), I will explore how far a sense of the otherness of the non-human

animal emerges in the interstices of what appears at first sight a rather anthropocentric

portrayal of the porcupine of the title.

Małgorzata Martynuska


Małgorzata Martynuska, Ph.D works at the Institute of English Studies, University of

Rzeszow, Poland. She obtained her MA from American Studies Center of Warsaw University

and received her PhD from Jagiellonian University in Cracow. Her research area concerns

cultural hybridity of US Latina/os, acculturation patterns, transculturation, ethnic

representations in American media. The courses she has been teaching include American

Society, Culture of English-Speaking Countries, Civilization of Anglo-Saxon Countries and

BA/MA seminars focusing on multiethnic issues in the USA.

Is Puerto Rico an American colony? Trump’s response to Hurricane Maria Session 9

The article is devoted to the commonwealth status of Puerto Rico which through territorial

annexation by the United States has become an “independent territory” controlled by the

USA. It summarizes the history of the U.S. – Puerto Rico relations: the failure of the

assimilation policy on the island, and implementation of so called “Puertorriqueñista”

colonialism which officially recognized Puerto Rican culture and Spanish language, but at the

same time maintained the colonial status of the island. This text analyses press articles

published by BBC, CNN, The New York Times, US Today, Huffington Post and other papers

that discuss the treatment of Hurricane Maria survivors by the administration of President

Trump. The article compares the response of the federal government to the disaster in Puerto

Rico with the activities performed in the cases of Texas after Hurricane Harvey and Florida

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after Hurricane Irma. The analysis contrasts different treatment of American citizens

inhabiting American states and Americans from the “independent territory”.

Gilbert McInnis

University College of the North, Manitoba, Canada

Gilbert McInnis earned his Ph.D in English Literature at Université Laval in 2007. He contributed to

Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Kurt Vonnegut—New Edition (2008), published a monograph,

Evolutionary Mythology in the Writings of Kurt Vonnegut in 2011, and contributed to Kurt Vonnegut:

Critical Insights. Ed. Robert T. Tally Jr., 2013. As publisher of InExile Publications, he reissued Paul

Goodman’s Moral Ambiguity of America, and acted as editor for a debut work by the American poet Erik

Wackernagel’s She Bang Slam. He taught English literature at Université Laval, Université

Chicoutimi and Bishop’s University in Québec, at Grenfell College in Newfoundland, and at

Acadia University in Nova Scotia. He also served as Senior Writing Tutor at Dalhousie Uni-

versity and Saint Mary's University, Halifax, and is currently serving on the Tataskweyak

Cree Nation in Thompson, Manitoba, as Senior Writing Instructor at the campus of the

University College of the North.

The Posthuman Vision of Philip K. Dick Session 7

Philip K Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? explores the notions of the schizoid

and the android, which are prototypes for the posthuman. Dick created androids to represent

people physiologically and psychologically behaving in a non-human way, which is the same

as Dick's literal interpretation of a human without empathy — the schizoid. Hence, androids

are metaphors for schizoid humans, or posthumans. Furthermore, there is a metaphysical

worldview underlying Dick's notion of empathy which differentiates the posthuman from the

human, and this worldview conflicts with the materialistic worldview of the posthumans. In

this paper, I argue that Dick supports the metaphysical worldview over the materialistic

ideology of the posthuman. The method of investigation for this paper draws primarily on

Dick’s novel and three of Dick’s later essays. I conclude that Philip K. Dick wrote about the

notions of the schizoid and android as prototypes for the posthuman long before anyone had

an idea to embark on a full-length study of the posthuman, and Dick's posthuman vision was

an insightful warning about the coming implications of the schizoid posthuman for the

twenty-first century.

Dana Florentina Nicolae

University of Bucharest, Romania

Dana Florentina Nicolae is a PhD candidate in her 1st year at the Center of Excelence in

Image Study at the University of Bucharest, Romania and is writing a paper on virtual reality

cinema and aesthetics. She has B.A. in Art History and an M.A in Art History and the

Philosophy of Culture, both from the Faculty of History at the Universtity of Bucharest.

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Perceptual transfer in virtual reality. Leaving the physical body exposed to dangers. Session 2

Those who have experienced modern virtual reality (VR) through an HMD (head mounted

display) surely have noticed that while they are engaged with the virtual content their body

remained undefended so to speak. Due to the fact that VR headsets take over a good portion

of the perceptual apparatus of a person, and consequently the known sense of presence or of

‘being there’ - in that virtually generated world, the rest of the body is stripped of its

functioning as a whole and is left open to potentially dangerous events. This is one of the

main reasons why people who use VR headsets at events are carefully supervised by

somebody in case something bad happens. Interestingly enough, this precise situation serves

as a tense moment in many a movie that tackles virtual reality such as The Matrix (1999) or

even Avatar (2009). This presentation will explore this perceptual transfer and the state of

the body in danger while in virtual reality environments, disconnected from consciousness as

portrayed in several relevant movies.

Urszula Niewiadomska-Flis

The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland

Urszula Niewiadomska-Flis teaches American literature and culture at the John Paul II

Catholic University of Lublin, Poland. Her scholarly interests hover around representations

of foodways in literature and film. Her most recent project Live and Let Di(n)e: Food and

Race in the Texts of the American South (KUL Publishing House, 2017) examines how racial

relations and notions of race are challenged, negotiated, or confirmed through foodways and

foodscape in various texts of the American South. Her next scholarly endeavours include an

investigation of the role of food in American TV series.

Brain Appétit: mainstreaming zombies through culinary choices in “iZombie” Session 5

Zombies are amongst us, so claims the new American television series “iZombie,” which

premiered in March 2015 on the CW. This TV show, loosely based on the comic series under

the same title, does not offer a homogeneous image of zombies as creatures of Night of the

Living Dead. Apart from culinary preferences of the undead, which are used to depict

zombies’ potential to turn into nightmarish creatures once hungry, the culinary choices of the

titular heroine, Olivia ‘Liv’ Moore, perform another function. I intend to analyze how Liv’s

culinary choices are employed to “humanize” her and thus to make her less intimidating and

more acceptable to the mainstream audience. Thus, the major premise of the presentation is

that “gourmet” brains prepared and consumed by Liv are used to mitigate the presence of

threatening zombies, and as such to make zombies less recognizably nonhuman or undead.

Anna Oleszczuk

Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin, Poland

Anna Oleszczuk is a second year doctoral student at Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in

Lublin, Poland. Her research interests include gender identity and queer theory, comics, and

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science fiction. She plans to explore them by writing a dissertation on non-binary gender and

sexuality in S.F. comics.

Avatars of the Anthropocene: Gender in Dystopian Comics Session 7

Blurring the distinction between human history and geological history, the Anthropocene is

not only a geological concept but also a gendered one. It brings about the re-imagination of

gender, race, and class in response to the reconsideration of the relationship between the

human and the natural as “[i]n the Anthropocene, social, cultural and political orders are

woven into and co-evolve with techno-natural orders of specific matter and energy flow

metabolism at a global level” (Hamilton 4).

In my analysis of the selected science fiction comics, I would like to focus on the way that

thinking about gender and sexuality forms the experience and understanding of the loop of

nature, culture, and technology in the inhabited world and the perceived world. I intend to

explore gendered avatars of the Anthropocene such as monsters, cyborgs, aliens, and

genetically modified humans as represented in the selected dystopian comics and argue that

in these texts, without understanding the nature of anthropogenic effects and processes and

their social, biological, and technological causes it is impossible to comprehend the nature of

sex, gender, and sexuality as well as the relationship between them.

Małgorzata Ossowska-Czader

University of Łódź, Poland

Dr Małgorzata Ossowska-Czader pursues two complementary threads of research. Her

original research subject is the cultural identity of immigrants from the Indian Subcontinent

and the acculturation strategies they opt for, as represented in contemporary British novel

written by Indian diasporic writers. Currently, the emphasis is placed on Indian Writing in

English set in India. Her most recent project concerned Partition Literature and the

historiography of Partition and was aimed at reclaiming the meaning of Partition by relying

on the lived experience. In her literary studies she has adopted a wider research perspective

by applying theories developed within other disciplines of the humanities such as political

science, sociology and anthropology. The texts which are the subject of literary analysis are

treated as political - embedded in the real world, in the changing extratextual context.

Inspired by Jonathan Culler, dr Małgorzata Ossowska-Czader believes that literature is a

meaning-making practice and in the same way as other discourses, the literary discourse

forms messages which circulate socially. Her doctoral dissertation, prepared as part of the

Interfaculty Interdisciplinary Doctoral Studies in the Humanities at the University of Łódź,

entitled Search for Identity in the Novels by Second Generation Immigrant Writers from

South Asia and the Caribbean in Great Britain was published in 2015 by the University of

Łódź.

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Are the hills the adobe of gods or a storage facility for bauxite? - the environmental identity of ingenious people and raging ‘drumbeats of progress’

in India Session 3

The objective of the paper is to explore the inextricable link between a particular

environment and its inhabitants and how this intimate relationship is threatened by ruthless

progress which does not take into consideration the well-being of the locals. Both the Dongria

Kondh tribal people in the Niyamgiri Hills in south Odisha, described by Arundhati Roy in

her collection of essays entitled Broken Republic, as well as the people of Aathi in the novel

Gift in Green by Sarah Joseph have a very intimate relationship with their life-world. The

Dongria Kondh cultivate Niyamgiri’s slopes and gather wild foods from the forests, while for

the people of Aathi, which is a small village in the backwaters of Kerala, water is the only

source of livelihood as they have been farming rice in paddy fields and fishing for

generations. However, their immediate environment not only guarantees them self-

sufficiency but also constitutes the sacred. The Kondh worship the Niyamgiri hills as living

deities and the people of Aathi believe that the goddess of rice and fish dwells in the water

mansions in the marsh. The ingenious people of Niyamgiri as well dwellers of Aathi define

themselves through contacts with nature, they are one with the elements of their closest

milieu. The space immediately surrounding them is their soul. Yet, the Indian government,

acting as a new colonizer, eagerly gives the go-ahead to the mining corporation to extract the

estimated $2billion-worth of bauxite that lies under the surface of the hills, which could

result in the appropriation of the life-world of the Dongria Kondh, its total destruction and

displacement of its people. In the name of the promised GDP growth the Dongria Kondh are

to become the refugees of India’s ‘progress’. Accelerating Aathi along the expressway of

development means landfilling and levelling four hundred acres of backwaters in a

government-backed scheme to build an industrial township - “a massive paradise on earth”

and thus destroying the traditional way of life of its inhabitants. Are resisting ingenious

people stuck in the past enemies of progress or are they simply unwilling to pay the high price

of progress by losing their livelihood, their identity and the sanctity of their sacred sites?

Magdalena Ożarska

Jan Kochanowski University, Kielce, Poland

Magdalena Ożarska, Ph.D. habil. is Associate Professor at Jan Kochanowski University in

Kielce, Poland. She is the author of Meanderings of the English Enlightenment: The Literary

Oeuvre of Christopher Smart (2008), Lacework or Mirror? Diary Poetics of Frances

Burney, Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Shelley (2013) and Two Women Writers and their

Italian Tours: Mary Shelley’s “Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842 and 1843” and

Łucja Rautenstrauchowa’s “In and Beyond the Alps” (2014). Her research interests include

18th- and 19th-century English and Polish women’s self writing, animal studies, critical plant

studies, food studies and geopoetics.

Christopher Smart’s Thinking Hairy Session 6

The paper revisits Christopher Smart's Cat Jeoffry section (Jubilate Agno, 1759-1763) using a

Human and Animal Studies research perspective with a clearly delineated theoretical

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background. The issues discussed include the concept of pethood as embraced by the poet,

with special focus on the cat's nam e and its significance. Traces of the animal's Derridean

"looking back" at and responding to the human are sought, as is evidence of Dominique

Lestel's "thinking hairy" on the part of Smart the poet.

Piotr Płomiński

Independent scholar

Piotr Płomiński has received Masters Degree in English Philology at the University of Lodz in

2017. He wrote his M.A. thesis on the posthuman perception of consciousness in sci-fi

literature. His academic interests lie in studying the narratives of contemporary American

and British pop-culture.

Extension, multiplication, simulation – three stages of posthuman evolution in Charles Stross' Accelerando.

Session 5

British science-fiction author Charles Stross, in his novel Accelerando provides a vision of the

cultural and economic consequences of embracing the posthuman paradigm.

Stross tells his story from the perspectives of three generations of a single family, positioning

these characters as both witnesses and active agents in the process of transforming both the

world and humanity into the realm of the posthuman. The protagonists affect the trajectory

of human evolution and are in turn subjected to externally motivated transformation

themselves. Thanks to this narrative theme of interactions between the individual and society

Stross is able to present a comprehensive insight into his vision of the posthuman future. The

concept of technological singularity envisioned by Stross in Accelerando as capable of

transforming the consciousness may also transform our ideas on what consequences may this

process have on society as well as the individual. Stross' narrative in a comprehensive

manner presents a progression of development of consciousness through not only extension,

but also multiplication and simulation. The aim of this presentation is to analyze the shifts in

the paradigms of individuality in the human subjects in Accelerando provoked by the

enactment of posthuman ideals.

Agnieszka Podruczna

University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland

Agnieszka Podruczna is a lecturer at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland, and she

has recently finished her PhD dissertation on the subject of the body in postcolonial

speculative fiction. Her academic interests include postcolonial studies, gender studies and

the theory of science fiction.

Unruly Bodies. Neocolonial Technocracies and the Ethics of Embodiment in Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl

Session 5

The relationship between the body and hegemonic discourse has long remained at the

forefront of postcolonial thought. However, with the rise and wider recognition of

postcolonial speculative fiction, the discussion concerning that relationship can be expanded

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to include new forms of embodiment—reaching beyond the limits of the human—that

simultaneously reproduce the existing power dynamics and contest them. Those power

relations between the bodily and the hegemonic, fraught with constant tensions, come to the

fore in Larissa Lai’s novel Salt Fish Girl, in which she examines the ways that Othered bodies

and neocolonial discourse interact in the futuristic setting of mid-21st century British

Columbia, debating the ethics of embodiment as well as the available strategies of resistance.

With that in mind, the following paper examines the intersections between the neocolonial

paradigm which creates and regulates Othered bodies, altered through genetic modifications

beyond the limits of the human, and the strategies of resistance developed in response to that

hegemonic power. Employing postcolonial theory as well as theory of science fiction as the

methodological framework, the paper argues that the genetically altered bodies of factory

workers known as Sonias constitute at the same time products of the neocolonial,

technocratic future of Serendipity and loci of anti-colonial resistance. Thus, the Sonias,

though marked by the neocolonial systems of oppression and created—literally as well as

figuratively—to serve as the image of the Other, reject the hegemonic paradigm of the

Saturna law, turning their unruly, disobedient bodies into visible signs of colonial anxiety and

transforming their mark of difference into a mark of resistance. This, in turn, contributes to

the further destabilization of the hegemonic system governed by the order of neocolonial

technocracy, while the Sonias emerge as transgressive and perverse—in Haraway’s

understanding—subjects.

Małgorzata Poks

University of Silesia, Poland

Małgorzata Poks, PhD is assistant professor in the Institute of English Cultures and

Literatures, University of Silesia, Poland. Her main interests concern spirituality, civil

disobedience, Christian anarchism, contemporary U.S. literature, Thomas Merton’s poetry,

U.S.-Mexican border writing, and Animal and Environmental Studies. She is a recipient of

several international fellowships and has published widely in Poland and abroad. Her

monograph Thomas Merton and Latin America: A Consonance of Voices was awarded “the

Louie” by the International Thomas Merton Society.

Thinking Animal Sovereignty beyond the Colonial Politics of Recognition: Louise Erdrich and Linda Hogan

Session 1

Canadian scholars Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka have proposed the extension of rights to

three categories of animals: domestic, wild and invasive. Still, using the liberal language of

rights to argue the cause of nonhuman animals, their Zoopolis is firmly situated within the

colonial politics of recognition, which is contested by numerous First Nations people.

Indigenous decolonial critics have argued that in settler states, indigenous humans and non-

human animals have been placed on the same side of the colonial difference. In consequence,

as I intend to demonstrate, both have suffered from the colonial paradigm of war as theorised

by Nelson Maldonado-Torres. In my paper I will extend the Fanonian notion of the damné to

non-human animals and try to think animal sovereignty beyond the liberal notions of

Zoopolis. My analysis will be based on selected novels by Louis Erdrich and Linda Hogan.

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Małgorzata Roeske

Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland

Ethnologist, PhD student. Currently working on dissertation about the social reception of the

death of companion animals. She has published articles in journals as “Zoophilologica”,

“Kultura Popularna”, “Kultura Współczesna”, “Maska” and others. Author of the book titled

“Piwnica bliżej śmierci, strych bliżej nieba. Etnografia ukrytych przestrzeni domu”. Her

research interests focus on human-animal studies, anthropology of space, philosophy,

phenomenology and virtual ethnography.

Philosophers and poets: A few remarks on non-human animal death. Session 1

The key question for posthumanism about the possibility of creating a demarcation line

between what is human and non-human, is also the question of the kind of criteria that

science should use to define what constitutes the essence of humanity. These criteria apply to

both the humanities and the biological sciences. The opposition between man and animals is

deeply rooted in social perceptions, which have their source in the western philosophical

thought. Significant ontological differences, on which the concept of human and animal is

built, are also reflected in distinct ways of conceptualization of animal and human death.

The model, under which humanity is defined by the contrast with the animal, also in the

context of ways of experiencing death, can be found both in philosophy and in literature.

Rainer Maria Rilke wrote that the animals are free of death, because they experience reality

directly, in a non-discursive way. In a similar, though much more evaluative way, it is

presented by Heidegger, according to whom dying is the way of being specific only to the

mankind (and thus it defines humanity), not the animals because they cannot conceive the

possibility of their own non-existence. Heidegger's existential concept has been criticized by

Derrida, who pointed out its internal contradiction - death, understood as non-being, is the

experience that is not accessible also to the man. The writer John Maxwell Coetzee also

argues with this approach from another, more subjective perspective: individual experience

of participating in the animal dying allows us to note that although the animal death does not

have the intellectual dimension, it cannot detract the importance of this experience for the

animals themselves.

Do animals have consciousness of their own death? Do they know - as Gilles Deleuze claims -

how to die? Should death be perceived as pre-reflective, embodied or discursive

phenomenon? How can we write about animal’s dying? In the light of the findings of modern

science these issues should be put in question again.

Paulina Rydz

Jagiellonian University, Department of Anthropology of Literature and Cultural Studies,

Poland

PhD Candidate in Polish Literature, fields of interest: posthumanism, animal studies,

contemporary literature

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Becoming a post-animal? A non-human perspective in modern and post-modern literature

Session 9

This concept refers to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s strategy of “becoming-an-animal”

by asking further questions about the status of an animal regarding posthumanism and

animal studies. Inspired by Rosi Braidotti’s idea of a posthuman (a subjectivity defined by its

relations to other subjects and connections with its environment), I’d like to reflect on a

question of an animal and animality in XX century literature and propose a new term: “a

post-animal”. The analysis of Franz Kafka’s “Investigations of a Dog”, Mikhail Bulgakov’s

“Heart of a Dog” and Paul Auster’s “Timbuktu” allows distinguishing a new form of non-

human subjectivity, challenging the human-animal and the nature-culture binaries.

Julia Siepak

Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland

Julia Siepak graduated from Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń with a BA degree in

English Studies. She is currently an MA student in English Studies and a BA student in

Applied Linguistics: Italian and Spanish at the Faculty of Languages, NCU. She is a member

of the Polish Association for Canadian Studies (PACS) as well as a member and the secretary

of the Academic Association for Doctoral Students at the Department of English, NCU. Her

academic interests encompass North American Indigenous studies, postcolonial and diaspora

studies, post-structural theory, and contemporary fiction.

North American Indigenous Environmental Knowledge in Kisima Inŋitchuŋa Session 10

Land performs a central function in North American Indigenous Cultures; the homeland is a

source of identity providing the sense of belonging. Native tribes incorporate the elements of

surrounding environment in their creation stories to clearly mark their place in the world. In

Indigenous outlook humans are not the only sentient creatures on the planet, for the animals

as well as inanimate objects, according to Western classification, are spirits. Therefore, the

relation of human beings towards nature manifests respect, responsibility, and

interconnectedness. The aim of this presentation is to address the human connection with

environment as represented in an Indigenous video game, Never Alone, also called Kisima

Inŋitchuŋa (2014). The game is based on Kunnuksaayuka – Inupiaq (Indigenous Alaskan

nation) traditional narrative telling the story of a child going on an errand to explore the

origin of a dreadful blizzard. I address the game’s plot together with “cultural insights” –

short videos related to Inupiaq traditions and lifestyle, referring to the traditional Indigenous

environmental awareness transmitted from generation to generation. The persistence of a

traditional way of approaching nature with respect and ensuring sustenance without causing

imbalance within the ecosystem is stressed as an element of survivance – a term coined by a

Chippewa scholar and writer, Gerald Vizenor, which describes the continuation of native

stories and traditions despite the colonial contact. Finally, the issues discussed in the

presentation are to be briefly situated in the larger context of Indigenous environmental

knowledge and its use for contemporary purposes.

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Patrycja Sokołowska


Patrycja Sokołowska is a PhD student at the Institute of English Cultures and Literatures at

the University of Silesia. Her eclectic academic interests include Old English poetry, theory of

science fiction and fantasy, popular culture, podcasts as a “new” medium, and others. Her

current research is focused on dark ecology and the literature of the weird, both the

pioneering works and the New Weird, and H. P. Lovecraft’s influence on the genre.

Horizon Zero Dawn: The Dusk of Reality Colonized by the Human(?) Session 10

Postapocalyptic texts of culture are not a groundbreaking invention; in fact, a considerable

amount of texts written in the twenty first century foresee the end of humanity, be it as a

whole, or as the reigning race. This decentralization, or even the absolute annihilation of the

human is often taken up in the rather young medium of video games, with one such example

being the released in 2017 Horizon Zero Dawn. As a narrative which presents a world where

humans are deprived of most significant technological development of the human race,

Horizon Zero Dawn pushes humanity off the pedestal upon which humanism has put us, and

instead, places technology and its offspring, mechanical animals, at the centre. In my

presentation, using the lens of postcolonial and posthumanist discourse, I would like to

discuss the ways in which Horizon Zero Dawn builds a narrative of a world that seems to be

postcolonial and posthumanist, and, above all, postapocalyptic. But despite those elements, it

seems to emphasize the fact that the narrative in which humans are at the centre of the power

structure is inescapable. The game attempts to, perhaps unconsciously, underline this

conclusion, as noted by the tentative question mark in the title.

Monika Sosnowska

British and Commonwealth Studies Department

University of Łódź, Poland

Monika Sosnowska completed her Ph.D on the representations of the senses in Hamlet and

selected film adaptations at the University of Łódź, Poland. At present she is teaching at the

British and Commonwealth Studies Department (University of Łódź). Her publications

include journal articles, chapters in books, co-edited books, and two monographs. Her most

recent book is From Shakespeare to Sh(Web)speare (University of Łódź, 2016). Her research

interests are Shakespeare and popular culture, green Shakespeare, ecology and ecocriticism,

adaptation and performance.

Reading Hamlet's Soliloquies Ecocritically Session 9

My paper situates Shakespeare's Hamlet within the emerging discourse of ecological

humanities on the natural world and the role of human and non-human beings in it. The aim

of this presentation is to analyse selected Hamlet's soliloquies, particularly those which

include utterances and reflections on: the ontological status of people and non-human

animals, as well as perception of different species in larger ecosystems. On the

methodological level I will turn to the critical perspective of ecocriticism with its new

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terminology and innovative analytical tools, which are useful to rethink humanism in the

context of our contemporary ecological concerns. With a relatively small amount of

publications (the first monograph Green Shakespeare: From Eco-Politics to Eco-Criticism,

New York: Routledge, was published in 2006 by Gabriel Egan), Shakespearen ecocriticism is

still in its nascent stage. Add to that the fact that Shakespeare studies in Poland are still

grounded in humanist thinking, I find posthumanist reading of Hamlet's soliloquies both

challenging and beneficial. My central concern is to expose ecocritical implications of

Hamlet's ethical and ontological dilemmas he faces when he is (left) alone with his „solid

flesh” or „to be or not to be” question. One of my fundamental question concerns how people

in the Anthropocene think about their relationships with our blue planet and its inhabitants

(organic cohabitants), namely non-human actors and their agency. In the precence of

prejudices towards other species, it is worth examining speciecism with reference to selected

lines from Hamlet's soliloquies. I also want to demonstrate how Shakespeare's ecolological

thinking hold lessons for people in the twenty-first century.

Radosław Siewierski

University of Wrocław, Poland

Radosław Siewierski was awarded the degree of Master of Arts in Literature in 2017. He is an

indepenent scholar and his academic interests focus on Aboriginal literature and mythology.

The Relationship between Animals and People in Aboriginal Mythology Session 4

“Is it moral to eat animals?” or “Is it moral to do experiments on animals?” are only two, out

of several, questions from which Animal Studies originated – a new discipline whose main

objective is to find and define a relationship between animals and people. Animals have

always been of the utmost importance in mythologies of various peoples – Aboriginal myths

are no exception.

Until recently, the mythology of the indigenous Australian people has not been widely

analysed; one of the most recent and significant works is Mitologia australijska jako nośnik

tożsamości by Andrzej Szyjewski (2014), but this is also one of very few works in the decade.

Aboriginals call their mythology “the Dreaming” or “Dreamtime”. It refers to the time, as they

believe, during which not only everything that exists appeared, but also to the period when all

animals were still people. At the end of Dreamtime certain people were changed into animals,

others were given the ability to take the form of an animal whenever they wanted. Depending

on how people behaved, what traits they possessed or what they did, some animals were later

given their own distinctive features, e.g. a man who was attacked with a spear which stayed at

the bottom of his backbone became a kangaroo and the spear became the tail of the animal.

The first objective of this project is to analyse Aboriginal myths in order to find and present

how animals are described in the context of people. Secondly, to conduct a similar analysis,

but with a view to showing how people are depicted in the context of animals. Finally, to

show the relationship between animals and people in those myths.

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Rafał Smoleń

University of Warsaw, Poland

PhD candidate in Law at the University of Warsaw, MA in Oriental and African Studies

Legal and socio-cultural conditions of language policy in postcolonial Africa in the light of postcolonial theory. The ideas of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

Session 3

The decolonization of Africa – or merely “formal decolonization”, as postcolonial theory

underlines – has spawned various conflicts between the newly arisen states. Nevertheless

there existed a few fundamental issues in which the new countries had promptly reached an

agreement. First of all they agreed that their borders, though resulted from the colonial

division, will remain intact. This declaration was largely respected, albeit it is necessary to

note that numerous border wars waged since late fifties in various locations in Africa had

claimed at least a dozen millions of victims. Secondly, the new countries have recognized that

efforts should be made to integrate – or at least cooperate closely on a political level – within

the framework of regional organizations and the Organization of African Unity. Unlike in the

case of the borders, this demand turned out to have been a vaulting ambition and it has been

realized only in part.

Such a consensus as in respect of the frontiers and integration, even if only declared, did not

consider the language policy. The new states had to decide – and they wanted to do that on

their own – whether they preferred a colonial or indigenous language to be their official or

national language. Both solutions could have brought many risks and uncertainties.

The main aim of the paper is to discuss the ideas of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (born 1938) – a

Kenyan dramatist, novelist, essayist, critic, scholar, cultural, social, and political activist, one

of the leading representatives of postcolonial theory in the world – on language policy in

postcolonial Africa in connection with the key ideas of postcolonial theory. To that end some

legal, philosophical, socio-cultural, and political thoughts of Ngũgĩ will be presented,

particularly those regarding the impact of language policy on the Africans’ individual and

collective psychological condition, language as a means to legitimize and execute the power,

its role in the struggle against neocolonial dependency, social and political commitment of

African writers and their language choices.

Mark Tardi

University of Łódź, Dept. of American Literature, Poland

Mark Tardi is originally from Chicago and he earned his MFA from Brown University. His

publications include the books The Circus of Trust, recently released from Dalkey Archive

Press, Airport music, and Euclid Shudders. A former Fulbright scholar, he lives with his

family in a village in central Poland and is on faculty at the University of Łódź.

“Dressed like stars in the blades of night”: On Lisa Jarnot’s poetics of non-human animals

Session 1

In her books Ring of Fire, Black Dog Songs, and Night Scenes, renown American poet and

biographer Lisa Jarnot offers the reader a wealth of poems about animals not historically

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well-represented in literature –– aardvarks, chinchillas, lemurs, razorback clams –– as well

as animals with wider historical and artistic representations such as cows and dogs. In both

cases, the animals perform a range of implausibly or absurdly anthropomorphic actions:

chinchillas sell wristwatches in France; lemurs like whiskey and evening trains; cows sing

with and love daisies in a field. Coupled with the actions of the animals, Jarnot deploys

recursive structures that both heighten the rhythmic and ludic qualities of the actions

described, but also toggle between playful humor and ethical confrontation. Using the work

of Cary Wolfe and others, this presentation seeks to examine what the larger social and

ethical implications are in Jarnot continually (re-)presenting these non-human animals in

her poems. How is Jarnot using playfulness and anthropomorphism as a platform for

profound social criticism, as a way to reconsider what constitutes the human(e)? How can the

poems step beyond their initial humor and implicate the reader in Jarnot’s critique?

Mateusz Tofilski


Graduate of Interdisciplinary Individual Studies in University of Silesia and PhD student at

the Institute of Philosophy in University of Silesia. Especially interested in issues connected

with neurophilosophy and philosophy of mind.

Scientific image of man-in-the-world in a cognitive science perspective Session 5

The dynamic pace of development of science in an obvious way influences the change of

thinking about the world and increase in importance of scientific image of man-in-the-world

(applying Wilfrid Sellars’s terminology). A great example for this phenomenon is the

development of neuroscience which is connected with more and more bold taking by this

discipline issues which are traditionally connected with philosophy, for example problem of

consciousness. In this context the issue of contemporary thinking about human and his

relationship to the environment in comparison with researches in cognitive science seems to

be very interesting. Researches based on evolution theory and discoveries in etology,

primatology and also in genetics and neurology has a lot to say, for example, in the matter of

the ethical status of animals and many more problems of ecophilosophy and environmental

ethics. Another good example is the question about qualia (a hard problem of consciousness)

in the context of cognitive processes in other species.

From the perspective of cognitive science, the embeddedness of human in his corporeality

and in his environment, his integration with surrounding reality is connected with paradigm

of embodied mind which is based on the externalistic idea of extended mind. In this point of

view seems to be corresponding with ecological, and even better, with oicological (oicology

means the science of home which can be also interpreted as environment) thinking about the

relationship between human and environment. However the same discoveries are the basis of

technological development, researches on AI or genetic engineering, which also generates

many new ethical questions. The main purpose of the paper is to show the role of cognitive

science and scientific image in contemporary debates connected with ecophilosophy and

contemporary ethics.

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Donald Trinder

University of Rzeszow, Poland

Is a PhD student at the University of Rzeszów, focussing on the conceptualisation of Poland

in the British press in the inter-war period. His other areas of academic interest include a

wider perspective on the history of Anglo-Polish relations, and the influence of modern

technology on the political process, the philosophy and culture of things, and the place of

man in the posthuman society.

Social Media: the Soma of the 21st century Session 2

Building on the works of eminent posthumanists such as Michel Foucault (Death of Man),

Leszek Kołakowski (The Self-Poisoning of the Open Society) and Francis Fukuyama (Our

Posthuman Future),the article is intended to investigate the intricate nature of the

relationship between man and social media, examining the changing nature of the interface

between human and technology. Giving examples of the nature of the interaction between

social media giants such as Facebook and Snapchat and the public, and incorporating the

current phenomena of ‘fake news’ it is intended to chow that the dystopian vision presented

by Huxley in which the general populace seek succour in the use of Soma is not, as suggested

by Fukuyama, to be found in the evil machinations of the pharmaceutical industry, but rather

the cynical efforts of tech companies to ensnare unsuspecting users in some form of ‘virtual

paradise’.

Tamás Vraukó

University of Miskolc, Hungary

Born: 1959, married, father of two daughters.

Obtained first diploma from the University of Debrecen 1987, PhD from the University of

Warsaw, 2004. Main research: translation studies, British and American studies

Chicanos in the U.S. after the Mexican War Session 8

After the Mexican War, Hispanic people who lived in the former territories of Mexico found

themselves in the position of second-rate citizens, they were treated as a colonized

population. Not only were their rights curtailed (e. g. same tax levied on them in California as

on foreigners), but they were subject to disdain and discrimination from the Anglos. This

attitude was reflected in politics and literature, and lasted well into the 20th century.

Agata Waszkiewicz

Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, Poland

Agata Waszkiewicz received her M.A. degree in Psychology from Warsaw University, Poland.

She is currently a doctoral student at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, Poland.

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Her field of interest include video games as well as queer and gender studies. She is currently

working on her dissertation on breaking the fourth wall in video games.

How video games challenge the posthuman mind Session 10

William Gibson (1986) wrote that "The data had never been intended for human input."

Indeed, among various disciplines there is a widespread view that human beings typically

experience their lives as a narrative (story). This way they construct private as well as public

and universal stories into coherent, understandable plots. Furthemore, narratives are used as

a mean of organizing data and constructing the self (Polkinghorne, 2004). On the other hand

Von Neumann, a father of a modern computer, would not agree with negating the similarities

between the human and the technological. As early as in 1958 he popularised what’s known

now as a computational theory of mind, which compares a brain’s neural system to a

computer and a mind to a program. Thinking like a computer means to organize the data in

non-linear and non-narrative ways. In the research paper it will be argued that video games

can be seen as a point of reconciliation between the human and the non-human (computer)

way of absorbing the information. Using the examples from this medium it will be

demonstrated that to (successfully) play video games, the player is required to present a

posthuman way of organizing and understanding data. Two types of games will be analysed.

First are those that incorporate non-linear, non-narrative way of experiencing and using data

on the gameplay and plot levels (Tacoma, 2017). Second argument will concentrate on how

some video games (Starcraft II, 2010; World of Warcraft, 2004-2016) expose the player to

the extensive amount of data in the non-diegetic user interface (UI) and how that extends

their mind. In the heart of the Anthropocene, video games will be introduced here as the

point of contact between the human and the non-human and a gateway of becoming of an

essence of the posthuman; the new posthuman mind.

Oksana Weretiuk

Universityof Rzeszów

Professor, Ph. D. (Dr hab.) Oksana Weretiuk defended her doctoral dissertation at Lviv

University, Ukraine in 1991. Her habilitation was completed in 2001 at the University of

Warsaw, Poland and she received the title of full professor in 2008, while working at the

University of Rzeszów. She specialises in comparative literature, being the Head of

Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies Unit in the Institute of English Studies. Her

current research includes comparative study of Slavic literatures, confrontation of Slavic

literatures with literatures of English-speaking countries; literatures of borderlands; cultural

identity; imagology, problems of literary reception and literary translation; geopoetics and

ecocriticism.

Connecting Environmental Humanities and collaborating with environmental research: a new mission of comparative studies

Session 6

The author of the presentation reflects on the function of comparative studies in the era of

rapid environmental and social change, in the period of rethinking the ontological

exceptionality of the human. She points out that in the paradigm of environmental

humanities which has captured already existing conjunctions across environmental

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philosophy, environmental history, ecocriticism, cultural geography, cultural anthropology,

and political ecology, comparative studies (comparative studies of literature and culture)

function as a bridge connecting environmentally oriented disciplines/ subdisciplines and in

this way helping both: to develop interdisciplinarity within the humanities and collaboration

with the social and natural sciences. On the other hand, she announces her anticipation that

comparative studies will, to a systematically greater extent, coincide with ecocriticism.

Paula Wieczorek


Paula Wieczorek (MA) is a PhD candidate at the University of Rzeszów. She holds a Master of

English Philology degree from the University of Rzeszów. In her research she focuses on

ecocriticism and ecofeminism in contemporary American, Canadian and Indian literature.

Her current work examines the impact of capitalism on the life of humans and nonhumans as

illustrated in the works of selected modern Canadian, Indian and American female writers.

A Goddess or a Cyborg? From ecofeminism to cyborg feminism in Margaret

Atwood’s The Year of the Flood (2009) Session 9

The following paper draws attention to the way Margaret Atwood’s novel The Year of the

Flood (2009) perpetuates the discussion between the seemingly opposed world views of

ecofeminist critics, such as Susan Griffin, Carolyn Merchant and Karen Warren, and the

theories of Donna Haraway associated with cyborg feminism. Ecofeminists identify the

women-nature connection and consider binary constructions existing in the Western thought

to be privileging reason over emotion, mind over body, and as such as constituting a crucial

factor in the inferiorisation of women and nature. While ecofeminist theorists reject

technology as inherently evil, in her landmark article “A Cyborg Manifesto” Donna Haraway

offers a feminist possibility of embracing technology by the blurring of the nature-human

dichotomy. The scholar proposes a model of a cyborg, i.e. a hybrid of the natural and the

artificial, as a metaphor that can aid in dismantling the women/nature binary. Given the

choice of becoming a goddess or a cyborg, Haraway chooses the cyborg, since it does not reify

the oppressive dichotomies of mind/body, nature/culture, men/women. The following paper

not only reveals Atwood’s perspective on technology and science but it also focuses on the

way the above-mentioned theories are bridged in the novel discussed. What is more, referring

to the works of Rosi Braidotti, the paper focuses on ecofeminism and its posthumanist

alliances, rethinking what it means to be a human in a world immersed in various forms of

oppression and environmental degradation.

Marek Wojtaszek

Department of American and Media Studies, University of Lodz, Poland

Marek Wojtaszek holds a PhD in the Humanities. He teaches media and communication,

cultural and gender studies. His areas of research include body and space, digital cultures,

philosophy of communication.

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Manneristic Presence. Silicolonisation and an Aesthetic of (Digital) Defacement Session 2

Dramatically altering the classical communication paradigm of feedback, sensory interfaces

of digital media precognitively mine our sensible data and industrially reengineer (our

spatial-temporal experience of) the present. Feed-forwarding this data into our future—

embodied—presence, digital interfaces contribute to the reduction of neuronal and

experiential plasticity. No longer a metaphysical specter, presence becomes technologically

captured and digitally revamped. Under digital liberalism where design has replaced

revolution and creativity substitutes resistance, how do we contend with the vagaries and

vacuoles of silicolonization? Taking up this challenge and disavowing the contemporary

cultural predicament of nostalgia, in this paper I offer a meditation on the human(istic) limits

of (thinking of) the code. Working within a realist-materialist and speculative-intuitive

framework, inspired by the philosophies of Deleuze and Simondon, I specifically focus on the

incorporeal and manneristic modes of entanglements of the human and the digital. Drawing

corporeality away from its humanistic capture within a concept of the body as a bounded

interiority by activating extensive becomings, digitally saturated physical spaces subject our

sensibility to virtual extensions and simulacral multiplications. Can we posit a digitally

enfolded sensibility that is not colonized by pre-established parameters of code and

assimilationist usurpations of cyborg? In other words, can we devise an aesthetic of

sustainable coexistence with(in) computational networks? Critically recognizing the limits of

the implication of the code in the processes of intensive securitization in global politics,

functionalist computational capitalism and (its) hedonistic culture of addiction, I develop a

neo-Baroque, speculative aesthetics of (human) defacement. In order to illustrate my

theoretical proposition, I will look at the airport space, which—tethering bodies to

technologies—emerges as in itself heterotopically virtual encompassing ‘any’ external reality,

as a manneristic space of training in intensity whose aim is (digital) freedom from

particularity.

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