Forum of Poetics | fall 2024

The climate crisis has not only caused some species to die out. Nature is responding to rapidly changing environmental conditions and this response is more often than not unpredictable. Many weird fiction texts have for a long time talked about the eccentric life of plants and animals that can undergo strange transformations and stage astonishing interventions in human worlds. Such phenomena extend beyond the widely publicized unprecedented mass invasion of the European blackbird into urban areas. Perhaps such effects of the climate crisis will reveal the powers of nature that have previously been only imaginatively described by Bolesław Leśmian and Bruno Schulz in their works? Respectively, subjectivity, which in literature has often been presented as open to exchanges with the natural world, susceptible to transformations, splits, unnatural growths of personality and consciousness, also enters the picture.

These two phenomena come face to face in some literary analyses, proving how important describing the many different unpredictable expansions and reactions of nature to the climate crisis is. Literary scholars trace its new entanglements and hypertrophies, showing how nature invades and merges with subjectivity that is constantly being “split” and problematized in some literary texts. Texturally complex and capable of creating countless textual entanglements, literature is an always active – often tested before and now increasingly popular – model for the studies of eccentric states of nature, morphological multiplications of subjectivity, and new interconnections between both. Life (bios) in them is an astonishing energy, sometimes giving rise to weird literary forms and sometimes to shapes that are fascinating, unique, and exemplary of beauty that has never been seen before, which could be metaphorically illustrated by the famous symmetriads and mimoids described by Stanisław Lem in Solaris.

The articles in this issue of Forum of Poetics address the question of literary subjectivity through the lens of environmental issues. Some analyze well-known fantastic poetic images anew. Joanna Grądziel-Wójcik examines the image of a woman in Halina Poświatowska’s poetry, who wrote “jest we mnie spłoszona mysz / i łasica węsząca zapach krwi” [a scared mouse is in me/ and a weasel that knows the smell of blood]. Magdalena Piotrowska-Grot shows that similar images may be found in other texts written by women. Her essay on the works of surrealist women artists shows that they often worked with the motifs of metamorphosis, eccentric transformations of the subjective and the objective. Maciej Mazur, in turn, describes the achievements of econarratology, investigating the possibility of connecting such an anthropocentric practice as storytelling with the non-human world. Mazur argues that both may cooperate in and through the self-referential, the autobiographical and the autofictional, as evidenced by the “metaleptic” fantasy about a future ecological catastrophe described by Wiktor Żwikiewicz in his novel. Such poetological issues also provide an important new context for autobiographical writing. The connections between life and subjectivity, the ingrowth of life into literature and vice versa, is traced by Patrycja Bąkowska in the texts of the Napoleonic soldier and poet Cyprian Godebski. Respectively, Mary Oliver in her collection of essays, as Shuai Tong shows, uses the convention of the ecological autobiography to describe symbiotic natural-biographical-poetic forms. In his ecopsychological analysis, Tong combines psychoanalysis and ecocriticism to reveal the dynamics of the life-sustaining entanglements between the subjective with the environmental. Olga Tokarczuk’s Primeval and Other Times is also a testament to this phenomenon. Xiaojin Guo examines how the human and the non-human worlds, fantastic and magical as they are, interconnect in the novel. They become strange environments in which characters cope with different fears. Krzysztof Zydor shows the endless autofictional multiplications of subjectivity in Andrzej Czcibor-Piotrowski’s prose, in which life (bios) transforms into a tangle of shapes and a house of mirrors. Karolina Starnawska, in turn, reminds us that today the literary subject quite often creates complex real-autofictional entanglements in social media. This is evidenced by the structure of Małgorzata Musierowicz’s authorial blog, which Starnawska analyzes in her article. Monika Wiszniowska describes how contemporary reporting tends to gravitate towards historical realities, unraveling dramatic connections between human and natural history. She analyses, among others, Filip Springer’s Miedzianka, which tells the story of a town which sank into the ground due to predatory mining. It would be hard to find a more moving reportage about how the human and the non-human intertwine in shocking new forms in the face of an ecological catastrophe.

The connection between weird fiction and speculative realism is well-known, as evidenced by Graham Harman’s study of Lovecraft. The articles in this issue of Forum of Poetics also point to literature’s capacity to speculate on the ever-surprising modulations and metamorphoses of the natural environment during and before the climate crisis. The study of possible further, other expansions and transformations of nature described in literature is combined with a new perspective on literary subjectivities, which in their unique textural simulations and subjective morphological complexities also reveal their eccentric and bizarre transformations. Literature’s ability to describe the encounters of these two constantly transforming environmental and subjective worlds has for a long time, and now with increased intensity, been its strength in the time of the climate crisis. It also turns out to be a challenge for the poetics of literature concerned with human-environmental metamorphoses.

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