Adam Kola

Nicolaus Copernicus University | umk · Center of Excellence IMSErt: Interacting Minds, Societies, Environments

The chapter provides a history of the formative years of Polish structuralism in the interwar period – divided into informal circles in Warsaw and Vilnius, and focuses on second-wave post-war Polish school of structuralism. The changes of 1968 placed the Polish structuralism on a new track (communicative variation of structuralism), parallel to but...

Purpose – Poland’s political and economic transformation after 1989 brought the logic of the neoliberal market into the educational system. These changes, however, were far from the real liberal free market and instead relied on bureaucratic and technocratic local-level apparatus as well as supranational supports (the EU). Moreover, instead of enha...

Although the first world, as seen through the lens of academia, seems to be prospering, and the third world has found its own place in the postcolonial intellectual order, the post-cold war world of semi-peripheries in East and Central Europe (ECE) has largely disappeared from the discourse of Comparative Literature. It sometimes appears as a conve...

‘When you are in the family ... you have more rights than when you are asking to join and knocking on the door’, said French President Jacques Chirac in February 2003. It was before the biggest enlargement of the European Community in 2004, and on the discussion stage with other countries, like Romania and Bulgaria. He added: ‘They missed a great o...

The essay argues that anti-politics, a category borrowed from the anti-communist movement in the Eastern Bloc, can inspire memory studies. We focus on one of the chosen categories – the parallel polis (with some forays into the matter of the nonviolence movement). We discuss this universal category through the particular lens of Central and Southea...

Artykuł składa się z trzech dopełniających się części i dotyczy herstorii jednej z polskich uczelni – Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika w Toruniu. Punktem wyjścia jest przygotowywana książka pt. Niewidzia(l)ne. Kobiety i historia Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika w Toruniu pod redakcją Aleksandry Derry, Anny Marii Koli oraz Wojciecha Piaska (planowana...

The aim of the paper is to answer the question: how should one write about masters? It is a question about the narrative strategies of authors writing about masters. The presented analysis is based on five examples: (1) John A. Hall’s Ernest Gellner: An Intellectual Biography, (2) Anita Burdman Feferman and Solomon Feferman’s Alfred Tarski: Life an...

The current migrant crisis has recently become one of the most significant topics of political and public debate not only in Europe but, in different forms and on a different scale, all over the world. Border barriers (fences and walls) and sinking asylum seekers’ boats, human trafficking and smuggling are among the most visible signs of contempora...

https://www.fil.umk.pl/xx-lecie-wydzialu/ The current migrant crisis has recently become one of the most significant topics of political and public debate not only in Europe but, in different forms and on a different scale, all over the world. Border barriers (fences and walls) and sinking asylum seekers’ boats, human trafficking and smuggling are...

The book 'Socjalistyczny postkolonializm. Rekonsolidacja pamięci' (Socialist Postcolonialism: Memory Reconsolidation) is about the Polish postcolonial tradition of before 1989, which has been blanked out of memory. The year 2000, i.e., the year in which the Polish translation of Ewa Thompson’s book Imperial Knowledge. Russian Literature and Colonia...

The aim of the presentation is to blend together what are usually separate academic fields – literary studies, life sciences, mathematics, and logic – within the framework of the informal aspects of scholarly activity. The main claim is that due to their informal interactions in both the public and the private sphere (cafés, homes, student theater,...

The text presents a new interpretation of the Old Rus’ Primary Chronicle through the lens of I. Wallerstein’s and A.G. Frank’s World(-)System Theories, combined with social constructivism and historical anthropology, which will allow the author to elaborate on the utility and advantages that this concept offers for the large-scale study of pre-mode...

Missing from the world history perspective is the semi-peripheral – in this particular case, Polish – contribution to this approach. The key figure of such a real world history is (or rather was) the Polish historian Marian Małowist (1909-1988), cited by Immanuel Wallerstein as his main inspiration and in fact a founding father (aside from Fernand...

Trzeci doroczny zjazd Polskiego Stowarzyszenia Komparatystyki Literackiej (pierwszy odbył się w Pobierowie k. Szczecina w 2014 roku, drugi w Warszawie w 2015), przygotowany we współpracy z Pracownią Komparatystyki Literacko-Kulturowej Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika, odbył się w dniach 30-31 marca 2016 roku w Toruniu. Spotkanie zostało szczegółowo...

Pamiec o bitwie na Kosowym Polu z 1389 roku byla i jest jedną z konstytutywnych cech serbskiej tozsamości, oddzialującą od XIX wieku zarowno na serbską i poludniowoslowianską pamiec kulturową (w tym wyrazaną przez dziela literackie), jak i na praktyke polityczną. Teza tego artykulu jest nastepująca: wszystkie teksty dotyczące Kosowego Pola, z klucz...

In its classical versions, intellectual history or the history of ideas tries to maintain distance from social life. In dealing with social context—whether historical, cultural, or political—it does so only in pursuit of a “better” explanation of a particular intellectual tradition. This makes us pose the question of how to research the effects of...

Pisanie recenzji prac zespołowych wydaje się pozbawione sensu. Jak bowiem ocenić całość przez pryzmat poszczególnych głosów? W tym kontekście wydania rocznicowe zdają się być szczególnie nieużyteczne, cel upamiętnienia – osoby, wydarzenia, itp. – przysłania jakikolwiek krytyczny, a taki przecież powinien być naukowy, ogląd rzeczywistości. Są jednak...

Histria życia Manfreda Kridla (1882–1957) mogłaby stanowić kanwę interesującej kulturowej historii intelektualistów pierwszej połowy XX wieku. Postać ta wydaje się dobrze znana, zwłaszcza w środowisku polonistów. Zarazem życie Kridla obrosło legendami, jego dzieło jest zapoznane, znaczenie umniejszane, natomiast koleje losu opisywane jedynie wybiór...

In this introduction to the volume “Benefits from comparison”, its editors, starting with the etymological meaning of ‘culture’ as ‘cultivation’, the apicultural metaphors of bee pastures and hive products, and both legal and everyday meanings of ‘uses’ and ‘benefits’, outline a diagnosis of the present state and perspectives of comparative literat...

This article presents world literature as a new paradigm emerging within comparative literary studies over the last twenty years. Focusing on key stages in this development, Kola explores not only its conceptual dimension, but also its institutional and organizational anchoring in the landscape of journals, institutions, conferences, publication st...

Theoretical movements, interpretative paradigms and intellectual fashions have been widely introduced to Poland (feminism, postcolonial studies etc.), rarely (g)localized, but without a good understanding of the real consequences of embracing those cultural models. In literary studies, the main obstacle preventing the fulfi llment of the paradigm s...

The original aim of the paper was a review of the three books, which show wider tendency of academic reflection on research and higher education in Poland. Three issues should be underlined: metareflection on academic scholarship, institutional and educational dimension of the university, social functioning of science and higher education. In Polis...

While I. Wallerstein’s world-system theory (W-ST) is frequently referred to in literary studies (see: Moretti; Casanova; and Liu, Robbins & Tanoukhi) and cultural studies (King), A.G. Frank’s notion of world system (without hyphen) is not used in comparative literature. However, the two approaches are not competitive, but rather complementary. The...

Review of the book: Danuta Ulicka, Literaturoznawcze dyskursy możliwe. Studio z dziejów nowoczesnej teorii literatury w Europie Środkowo-Wschodniej ['Discourses Feasible in Literary Studies. Studies on modern literary theory in the Central-Eastern Europe'], Kraków: Universitas, 2007. Ulicka's book aims at boosting the esteem and restoring the memor...

This article presents a new paradigm in comparative studies, referred to as 'comparative studies related to cultural studies'. The proposition refers to non-classical currents in our contemporary humanities, primarily, to cultural studies enjoying popularity in the West. In the centre of the project, culturalism and constructivism are situated, as...

The aim of the text is to show Russian influence on Polish politics at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. It focuses on the right side of the political scene where this Russian influence and Russophile thinking is the most evident. It takes into account the views presented by the representatives of Liga Polskich Rodzin, Młodzież Wszechpolska,...