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SWPS Sessions

Our recently-established cooperation with SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw makes it possible to extend the themes of the Festival into new areas, and also to reach an even wider audience. The SWPS Sessions at the Twelfth Between.Pomiędzy Festival consist of discussions during educational meetings directed at high-school students (with Anna Warso and Paweł Pyrka), and conversations aimed at all those interested in literature and translation (with Agnieszka Pantuchowicz and Tadeusz Rachwał). David Malcolm moderates the sessions.

Professor David Malcolm

Professor David Malcolm teaches at SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw. He has been involved with the Between.Pomiędzy Festival since 2010.

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Paweł Pyrka

Paweł Pyrka

Paweł Pyrka is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw where he teaches American literature and cultural and literary theory. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on the golden age of American pulp fiction and published articles on E. A. Poe, H. P. Lovecraft and S. Grabiński. His research interests include popular literature and culture, interactive narratives, memory studies, and exchanges between technology and culture.

From Poe to Miéville: Excursions into the (New) Weird. Paweł Pyrka in conversation with David Malcolm.

The tradition of weird fiction as a mode and poetics of writing within speculative literature has undergone numerous (and significant) transformations, since its beginnings in the creative minds of the likes of Edgar Allan Poe and Algernon Blackwood, its boom fueled by the pulp pages of Clark Ashton Smith and H. P. Lovecraft, finally to arrive in its New Weird form as epitomized by the works of China Miéville and Jeff VanderMeer. The conversation will serve as an excursion of sorts into the imaginary worlds created by authors of weird tales and an attempt to see their work as commentary on modernity, seen in a crooked glass, darkly.

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Anna Warso

Anna Warso

Anna Warso is an assistant professor at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw where she teaches courses in American literature and translation. She has published on melancholia, theatricality and loss in John Berryman’s “The Dream Songs” as well as on the work of Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery and a handful of American prose writers. Her academic interests include, among others, 20th century American poetry, transformative aspects of translation and, most recently, the poetics of correspondence.

„Otherwordly”. Anna Warso and David Malcolm talk about animals, plants and places and in some poems by Elizabeth Bishop.

Having lived in Brazil for many years, and earlier, in between Canada and the US, Elizabeth Bishop looked closely at landscapes, places and things. We will take a close look at animals and plants in some of her works. Why would one need a whole poem about a “tremendous” but rather “homely” fish and why should meeting a moose be so important? We are also going to talk about the things that might happen during the moments of connection between worlds filled with strange curious creatures and objects.

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Tadeusz Rachwał

Tadeusz Rachwał

Tadeusz Rachwał is Professor of English at the SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw where he teaches literary and critical theory. His publications address various issues of contemporary literary and critical theories in social and political contexts. His book on cultural uncertainties – “Precarity and Loss” – was published by Springer in 2017.

“A foreign sound to your ear”: David Malcolm and Tadeusz Rachwał in conversation on poetics of alterity

The discussion will address the ways some semantically and phonetically unclear texts of songs can be misinterpreted by listeners, including also those for whom the language in which they have been written is their native language. The main author of such foreign sounds to our ears will be Bob Dylan, though some other examples of estranging effects will also be discussed. The problem seems to be one of a poetics of alterity, of a cultural space not only for the foreign, but also of a foreignized foreign and its interpretive legitimacy. Bob Dylan’s legendary presence in the world surely does not depend solely on clear understanding of the lyrics of his songs, and numerous people listening to him performing do in some sense misread his texts – this also may well be the case of the so called native speakers of English. Though Dylan has been relatively well known in Poland from the beginning of his career, the lyrics of his songs largely remain obscure to a substantial part of the Polish audience, and it seems worth asking the question of what, and more or less how much of them, still remains foreign.

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Agnieszka Pantuchowicz

Agnieszka Pantuchowicz

Agnieszka Pantuchowicz is associate professor at the SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw where she teaches translation and literary studies. Her research areas are translation theory, cultural studies, comparative literature, and feminist criticism. She published articles on Polish and Anglophone poetry and poetics.

Rewriting and poetic language: Agnieszka Pantuchowicz in conversation with David Malcolm

The notion of rewriting used some time ago by Susan Basnett and Andre Lefevre as an almost synonym of translation seems to have made it possible to think of translation as a world-shaping and world-changing activity whose power can be, though needn’t be, innovative and creative. Rewriting can also be repressive and thinking about its manipulative potential in various literary processes “can help us towards a greater awareness of the world in which we live”. Poetic language is a crucial tool in building this awareness, and without finally deciding what Louise Glück’s and Bob Dylan’s poeticity signify, we propose a discussion on a few of their texts with an eye on the rewritten, also matching them against their Polish translations, so as to take some pleasure in knowing how Glück’s “soul creeps out of the tree” and how Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower”, for instance, can be – as a critic once noted – “about everything from the Vietnam War to Armageddon”.