Text Matters No. 10 (2020)

Issue 10 (2020), entitled “Literature Goes Pop” and edited by the journal’s editor-in-chief, Dorota Filipczak, revolves around the encounters between literary intertexts/conventions/genres and the visual/digital modes. Although the volume opens with a critical essay on Pamela Sue Anderson’s philosophy, the next sixteen scholarly texts explore a wide range of topics demonstrating close ties between literature and widely understood pop culture: film, music videos, the blogosphere, biographies of iconic poets, the realm of cyberpunk, video games, and even memes, as demonstrated by the article on online humor responding to the global crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The next section, playfully named “Literar(t)y Matters,” deals with the following subjects: sensorial aesthetics in modernist fiction, Hart Crane’s and Yvor Winters’s interactions with Emily Dickinson’s poetic legacy, the cosmic sublime in Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars, the depiction of racial issues in contemporary US in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. An American Lyric, the portrayal of 19^th-century America in Frances Wright’s works, Wallace Stevens’s ties to philosophy, a morphogenetic perspective on intertextuality, Thomas William Robertson’s well-made plays, and wartime propaganda and gender in Ahmad Mahmoud’s The Scorched Earth.

Małgorzata Hołda (University of Lodz) L’homme agissant and Self-understanding: Pamela Sue Anderson on Capability and Vulnerability Literature Goes Pop A Special Guest of Text Matters: Mieke Bal (University of Amsterdam) IT’S ABOUT TIME: Trying an Essay Film David Allen (Midland Actors Theatre, Birmingham) Dalí, Disney and Destino: Alchemy in Animation Dorota Filipczak (University of Lodz) Made to Connive: Revisioning Cinderella in a Music Video. From Disney to Arthur Pirozkhov: A Case Study Kathrin Dreckmann (Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf) Camp and Pop: David Bowie, Oskar Schlemmer, Madonna and Janelle Monáe Debbie Olson (Missouri Valley College, Marshall, MO) Cowboy Cops and Black Lives Matter: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and the Great White West[ern] Agata Handley (University of Lodz) Representing Absence: Contemporary Ekphrasis in “Apesh-t” Fiona Darroch (University of Stirling) Journeys of Becoming: Hair, the Blogosphere and Theopoetics in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah Małgorzata Budzowska (University of Lodz) In the Universe of Cassandra: The Ancient Topos of Clairvoyance in the Futuristic World of Minority Report (2002) Liam Gearon (Oxford University) “No Direction Home”: The Life and Literature of Bob Dylan–From “Desolation Row” to the Nobel Prize Jožef Kolarič (University of Ss. Cyril and Methodius in Trnava) Billy Woods’s Literary Intertexts Tomasz Fisiak (University of Lodz) Stranger Than Fiction: Gothic Intertextuality in Shakespears Sister’s Music Videos Eduardo Viñuela (University of Oviedo) Metanarratives and Storytelling in Contemporary Mainstream Popular Music: Romeo and Juliet in the Making of the Star Persona Tomasz Sawczuk (University of Bialystok) Taking Horror as You Find It: From Found Manuscripts to Found Footage Aesthetics Hossein Mohseni and Kian Soheil (Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran) The Consumptive Significance of Images and Interface Values in Cyberpunk Cities Marcin Hanuszkiewicz (University of Silesia, Katowice) The Death of Language: Listening to the Echoes (of Georges Bataille) in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II—The Sith Lords Christine Nicholls (Australian National University, Canberra) Online Humour, Cartoons, Videos, Memes, Jokes and Laughter in the Epoch of the Coronavirus Literar(t)y Matters Niklas Salmose (Linnaeus University, Sweden) Sensorial Aesthetics: Cross-Modal Stylistics in Modernist Fiction Alicja Piechucka (University of Lodz) Between Poetic Voice and Silence: Hart Crane, Yvor Winters, Metapoetics and Emily Dickinson’s Legacy Paulina Ambroży (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań) “Our Eyes Adjust to the Dark”: The Cosmic Sublime in Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars Jerzy Kamionowski (University of Bialystok) “By [some] other means”: Talking (about) Racism and Race through Visual Arts in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. An American Lyric Justyna Fruzińska (University of Lodz) Frances Wright’s America: A 19^th-Century Utopia Małgorzata Hołda (University of Lodz) The Poetic Bliss of the Re-described Reality–Wallace Stevens: Poetry, Philosophy, and the Figurative Language Tomasz Burzyński (University of Silesia, Katowice) Systemic Intertextuality. A Morphogenetic Perspective Anna Prośniak (University of Lodz) “Sardoodledom” on the English Stage: T. W. Robertson and the Assimilation of Well-Made Play into the English Theatre Ramin Farhadi (Azad University of Karaj, Iran) Wartime Propaganda and Gender in Ahmad Mahmoud’s The Scorched Earth: A Dissident Reading