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The editorial concerns the characteristics of a new section entitled Critical Scene, which will present critical articles showing how statements about literature, art and theory function in the academic field. It is a proposal to create a model of dramaturgical critique that will show the process of creating the relationship between a work and the field in which it operates. The new section strengthens the vision of dramaturgical literary studies developed on various stages combining art and science.

The paper aims to answer the question – to what extent is the current reflection on user experience design in performing arts still valid? The text discusses the concept of post-digital performance (Causey); and the phenomenon of user experience design in the face of new media dramaturgy (Eckersall, Grehan, Scheer). From the perspective of these concepts and phenomena, I describe two works (To Like or Not to Like by Interrobang and Karen by Blast Theory). The text complements the discussion on performance artists’ approaches to media technologies. In this paper, I describe the changes in designing the relationships of performers and users (individualization and personalization) and the contexts of everyday media practices in artists’ strategies.

The article opens with a statement that dramaturgical creativity, long marginalized by literary studies, has returned to the area of its interest together with its researchers’ use of the achievements of performative and cultural turns. Taking these into account allows us to treat drama as a distinctive literary practice in which the reception of a text is exemplary. As the author claims, with the New Humanities, integrating scattered reading perspectives known to the history of literary studies into the horizons of New Positivity, dramatic studies enrich this standpoint and maintain a critical view making creative use of the antagonism of perspectives, confrontation of attitudes, conflict of qualities or different visions and ideas. The potential tensions revealed in the practice of active reading of a literary text in accordance with the dramatic matrix guarantee the positive effects of each act of engaged reading. The dramatization of tradition is a specific field of critical dialogue between the reader and the existing literary tradition. Three dramatic works by Jan Czapliński are indicated as examples of mediators for this dialogue. The work of this playwright presents and suggests a critical reading of the characters and works of Gabriela Zapolska, Henryk Sienkiewicz and Adam Mickiewicz, leading to the emancipation of their works that is situated beyond the framework of the discursively created, existing canon of contemporary Polish literature and culture. A critical view enriches and updates the canon. Dramatization, which allows the revaluation of existing values, appears as the basic category of contemporary art – revealing existing, usually ineffable conflicts and using them to build new, positive values.

The article discusses Roland Barthes’ experience of photography and presents its distinctive dramaturgy, which emerges from the reflections of the author of The Light of Image. It is played out between attempts at a theoretical grasp of the essence of photography and a personal, intimate experience of being photographed, but also of being a spectator looking at various photographs. Barthes places this experience in two basic perspectives. The first is connected with the process of taking photographs and the second with the experience of the spectator. This also includes the experience of photography with one’s own image, which according to the author, is always an experience of oneself as someone else, and the experience of searching for “the truth of photography”, especially important in the context of the photographs of his deceased mother. It is significant in Barthes’s concept that he is talking about traditional photography which had a completely different character and performed different functions to digital images do today. Moreover, as the author notes, Barthes’s theoretical findings would be untenable in relation to digital photography.

The article is an attempt to reconsider, reinterpret and, at the same time, summarize the concepts of dramaturgy and dramatology as they were developed by the author mainly in his research realized within the framework of the Chair of Drama and then the Chair of Performance Studies at the Jagiellonian University. Despite the fact that efforts to establish a broad understanding of drama and dramaturgy that is not restricted to art but is used to analyse and interpret performative aspects of social life were not fully successful, the main goal of the article is to support this idea by claiming the need for a ‘return to dramatology’.  

The article presents the concept of collaborative writing or multi-author writing using the example of the novel Black Paris by Jolanta Fuchsówna, a forgotten columnist of the “Ilustrowany Kurier Codzienny”, and the avant-garde poet and writer Jan Brzękowski. This interwar novel from 1932 is yet to be published in book form. The specificity of the preserved materials and the manuscript make the concept of collaborative writing the operative one for studying the text and describing these writers’ collaboration.

The starting point for the discussion presented in the article is the question whether it is possible and reasonable to distinguish the non-anthropocentric essay. The author refers to the latest genological findings, indicates why the assumed descriptive categories make it difficult to recognise that genre, and then formulates a range of counter-arguments (with a particular focus on subjectivity) and defines certain requirements for the non-anthropocentric essay. The later part of the article is devoted to the work of Michał Cichy as an example of a non-representative embodiment of that form. His essays, related to the concepts by Tim Ingold and Tadeusz Sławek, are examined from the angle of the practice of intertwining the open world, which abolishes the hitherto dominating position of the human subject and creates space for non-anthropocentric expression.

This article attempts to read Juliusz Słowacki’s Arab from the comparative perspective of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. The protagonist of Słowacki’s oriental tale, who is a variation on the Byronic hero, also shows similarities with Milton’s Satan: unceasing motion, obsession of revenge, loneliness, axiological preference of evil. The analysis of those similarities creates a new interpretative context for Arab, which was hitherto regarded as a superficial study of the pathological psyche or a caricature of the Byronic model.

The article presents the phenomenon of clearance in both the poetry of Bolesław Leśmian and the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. The author indicates the common points in both these thinkers’ investigations. In addition to a review of the previous discussions of this problem, the article postulates including the clearance in the group of aesthetic categories, because of its dynamic character. It also proposes a modified definition of clearance as a contrast of light with predominant albeit secondary darkness.

Tkaczyszyn-Dycki’s poetry invariably tempts one to identify the “external” poet (author) with a textual subject, who, thanks to various literary tricks, can be called an “internal” poet. This “internal” poet does not have a purely literary or linguistic character, as he seems to be endowed with a body, biography or agency. However, these categories cannot be convincingly described using only structural tools. The paper proposes to look at the possible performativity of Tkaczyszyn-Dycki’s poetry, designed in the text itself, starting with examining the concept of trauma, which facilitates a different view of the relationship between text and “reality”, then reinterpreting the problem of subjectivity and the crucial literary “strategy”. Therefore, it is a performative reading in the sense that it will focus on what (faith, empathy, trust – and, on the contrary, distrust) Tkaczyszyn-Dycki’s work tries to convince readers to, but also on what the main intention stands for.