Text Matters No. 13 (2023)

Issue 13 (2023), entitled “Literary and Visual Extremities” and edited by Małgorzata Myk and Mark Tardi, explores the notion of extremity in diverse types of artistic practice, from strictly literary to visual/performative. Eleven scholarly texts, collected in five subsections (“Extreme Borders,” “Extreme Ecologies,” “Limits,” “Extreme Forms,” and “Memory in Extremis”) deal with the works by Lara Haddad, Divya Victor, Allison Cobb, Adam Dickinson, Jorie Graham, Clark Coolidge, Barbara Guest, Susan Howe, Emmett Williams, Roman Stańczak, Dennis Cooper, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Jordan Harrison. The volume continues with the “Artistic Collaborations” section, supervised by Justyna Stępień and Joanna Kosmalska. It consists of six articles that discuss Matthew Barney’s Redoubt, Colum McCann’s Apeirogon, Richard A. Carter’s Waveform, the notion of multilingualism in Polish migrant theatre, and, finally, the Spirals artistic project. The next section, “Grief/Trauma/Social Unrest,” centers on the portrayal of mourning in selected US-American TV series, grief memoirs, the depiction of toxic masculinity in Teddy Wayne’s Loner, and representations of working-class communities in British cinema. The final section, “Continuities,” examines literature concerned with the ecological future, Harry Styles’s music videos, the notion of abjection in Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, and nation-building in India in the early 20^th century, as demonstrated by the press from this period. Additionally, issue 13 contains two reviews: of Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger and Caroline Young’s Crazy Old Ladies: The Story of Hag Horror.

LITERARY AND VISUAL EXTREMITIES Małgorzata Myk (University of Lodz) and Mark Tardi (University of Lodz) Introduction Extreme Borders Dorota Golańska (University of Lodz) Negotiating Interior Frontiers: Lara Haddad’s A Question of History (2015–16) Małgorzata Myk (University of Lodz) Duration of the Archive: Soundscapes of Extreme Witnessing in Divya Victor’s Curb Extreme Ecologies Paulina Ambroży (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań) The Posthuman Body as an EcoGothic Wasteland in Allison Cobb’s After We All Died and Adam Dickinson’s Anatomic Gi Taek Ryoo (Chungbuk National University, Korea) Radical Ecopoetics: The Apocalyptic Vision of Jorie Graham’s Sea Change Elina Siltanen (University of Turku) and João Paulo Guimarães (University of Porto) Clark Coolidge’s The Land of All Time: An Affectively Restless Ecopoem Limits Hal Coase (Sapienza University of Rome) Delimit / De-limit: Barbara Guest at Kandinsky’s Window Jacek Partyka (University of Bialystok) “What I lack is myself”: The Fluid Text and the Dialogic Subjectivity in Susan Howe’s Debths Extreme Forms Tomasz Sawczuk (University of Bialystok) Plasticity and the Poetics of Inside-Out Inversion in Emmett Williams and Roman Stańczak Cameron Barrows (Independent scholar) HTML Texts and the Dawn of Asemic Digital Literature: Exploring Dennis Cooper’s Ideas Memory in Extremis Paola Trimarco (The Open University, UK) The Extremities of Literature: Traumatic Memory in Two Novels by Kazuo Ishiguro Anna Bendrat (Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin) “How Do You Know Who You Are?”: Marjorie Prime on Envisioning Humanity Through the Faculty of AI-Powered Memory as Reconstructive Tissue ARTISTIC COLLABORATIONS Radek Przedpełski (Trinity College Dublin) Cosmic Hunt, Copper Electroplating, Chaosmic Transduction: Chaosmotechnics of Molecular Collaboration in Matthew Barney’s Redoubt Project (2016–21) Marta Goszczyńska (University of Lodz) Practices of Planetary Relationality in Colum McCann’s Apeirogon Katarzyna Ostalska (University of Lodz) Waves of Pixels and Word-generated Algorithms: Drone Poetry as a Collaborative Practice between Machine and Human in Waveform by Richard A. Carter Karolina Prykowska-Michalak (University of Lodz) and Izabela Grabarczyk (University of Lodz) “English with a Polish Accent and a Slight Touch of Irish”: Multilingualism in Polish Migrant Theatre Noèlia Díaz Vicedo (University of the Balearic Islands) and Hari Marini (Ionian University) Artist Collaboration and Unity in Times of Crisis: The Spirals Project GRIEF/TRAUMA/SOCIAL UNREST Nelly Strehlau (Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń) Grievable Lives during the COVID-19 Pandemic: US-American Television, Melodrama and the Work of Mourning Katarzyna A. Małecka (University of Lodz) “The particulars of loss”: Grief Memoirs and Their Pragmatic Applications Ewa Kowal (Jagiellonian University, Kraków) Dialogic, but Monologic: Toxic Masculinity Meets #MeToo in Teddy Wayne’s Campus Novel Loner Artur Piskorz (Pedagogical University of Cracow) Erasing “Knowable Communities”: From Saturday Night and Sunday Morning to Brassed Off CONTINUITIES Christian Arnsperger (University of Lausanne) and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet (University of Lausanne) Envisioning the Ecological Future: Three Perspectives off the Beaten Track Liz Giuffre (University of Technology Sydney) and Philip Hayward (University of Technology Sydney) Harry Styles as a Cecaelia: Sexuality, Representationand Media-lore in “Music for a Sushi Restaurant” Hossein Mohseni (Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran) Abjection of the Other in Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend: The Subject’s Deterrence Strategy for Becoming the Abject Akansha Singh (NALSAR University of Law, India) Periodicals and Nation-Building: The Public Sphere, Modernity, and Modernism in Modern Review and Visva Bharati Quarterly REVIEWS Mark Tardi (University of Lodz) “All of history a rehearsal for its own extinction”: A Review of Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger (Knopf, 2022) Tomasz Fisiak (University of Lodz) Grande Dame Guignol at 60: A Review of Crazy Old Ladies: The Story of Hag Horror by Caroline Young (BearManor Media, 2022)