Wit Pietrzak
Biographic Data
| ID | 3087665 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Wit Pietrzak |
| GIVEN NAMES | Wit |
| FAMILY NAME | Pietrzak |
| SIGNATURE | PIETRZAK W |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Lodz |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2231-7036 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 12 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
“Sympathetic Vibrations”: Music, Language and Ecology in the Poetry of Moya Cannon
The essay focuses on the poetry of Moya Cannon and her idea of poetic language as a link between people and the material environment in which they dwell. Throughout her oeuvre, Cannon shows that poetic language, which she often associates with music, is rooted in nature through its sonic organisation. The present essay sets out to demonstrate that by investigating the relationship between song, language and material environments, she seeks not on…
Resonant and regular: Silence in Derek Mahon’s later poetry and prose
Confederate Agency of Things: Maurice Scully’s Tig
The essay argues that Maurice Scully’s Tig, the concluding volume in his Things That Happen project, represents what Jane Bennett has termed confederate or distributive agency, whereby the material world, both animate and inanimate, becomes agentive through its capacity of expression. Semiotically active, things reveal a vitality and expressiveness that classic humanism regarded as solely a feature of humans. Scully’s formal experiments, discusse…
Withdrawal back to Earth: Derek Mahon’s Gaian Vision
In the present essay, Derek Mahon’s last four collections, from Life on Earth (2008) all the way to Washing Up (2020), are analysed in the context of ecology. I argue here that Mahon’s increased attention to man-caused environmental destruction is predicated on a withdrawal from the world of profit-obsessed capitalism in favour of a silent contemplation of nature, which Mahon evokes through the figure of Gaia. Relying on Bruno Latour’s revision o…
Vibrancy of nouns: Philip Terry's Quennets and the vitality of matter
The essay focuses on Philip Terry’s collection Quennets (2016), exploring its formal innovativeness, derived from the techniques of the Oulipo, as a way of evoking a vitality of matter. The idea of matter being alive is derived from Jane Bennett and connected to the idea, developed by biosemiotics, that all entities in the thingly realm are capable of generating and reading signs. It is in this dual context that Quennets is situated in order to s…
Voicing the Terrestrial: Theory of the Lyric and the Pressures of the Anthropocene
In the present essay, I argue that lyric ecopoetry is particularly suited to alter our worldview in favor of a more ecologically-aware stance. In itself this position has been announced by numerous ecocritics, with some doubts as to its adequacy expressed by Timothy Clark in his Ecocriticism on the Edge . Partly in response to his critique, it is here argued that poems do offer a viable way of altering human modes of thinking not by what or how t…
Framing potentiality in Vona Groarke's X
Vona Groarke has long evoked domestic spaces as a means of self-definition in face of a fluid world. Unlike her earlier work, though, in Four Sides Full and X, she finds in architectural constructions, gardens and visual arts a liminal space in which the persona withdraws from the world of action and actuality into a state of potentiality. Although this state is fraught with painful feelings of loneliness, Groarke, in order to resist the seclusio…
Constitutions of Self in Contemporary Irish Poetry: ‘Into the Light’
Lyric Poetry and the Disorientation of Empathy
In the present essay, I argue that empathy constitutes the mode in which lyric poetry registers in the readers. However, unlike in prose, where the reader is allowed to empathize with the characters via the mediation of the narrator, in poetry, as Jonathan Culler and a number of other theoreticians of the lyric have indicated, the reader assumes the position of the speaker, thus becoming a re performer of the text. This positioning, in turn, crea…
Michael Kindellan, The Late Cantos of Ezra Pound: Composition, Revision, Publication, and Andrew S. Gross, The Pound Reaction: Liberalism and Lyricism in Midcentury American Literature
1. Michael Kindellan, The Late Cantos of Ezra Pound: Composition, Revision, Publication 2. Andrew S. Gross, The Pound Reaction: Liberalism and Lyricism in Midcentury American Literature London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. Pp. 288. ISBN: 9781474258753 Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2015. Pp. 262. ISBN-13: 978-3825364700 Wit Pietrzak Pound’s work continues to excite and trouble, which finds its confirmation in the critical attention given to…
Retracing Mischief: “Fol de rol” and (Irish) Modernist Pastiche (Muldoon-Yeats-Trench-Farquhar)
Pastiche grew to become one of the hallmarks of modernist literature in general, and of Irish modernism in particular, one thinks of the “Cyclops” chapter of Ulysses, Yeats’s explorations of the ballad and the sonnet and more broadly of George Moore, Flann O’Brien as well as MacNeice and Beckett. Pastiche, always on the verge of parody, seems one of Irish specialties. In this article, I focus on a series of works that re-deploy a single line of r…
The Critical Thought of W. B. Yeats
The Critical Thought of W. B. Yeats
Retracing Mischief: “Fol de rol” and (Irish) Modernist Pastiche (Muldoon-Yeats-Trench-Farquhar)
Pastiche grew to become one of the hallmarks of modernist literature in general, and of Irish modernism in particular, one thinks of the “Cyclops” chapter of Ulysses, Yeats’s explorations of the ballad and the sonnet and more broadly of George Moore, Flann O’Brien as well as MacNeice and Beckett. Pastiche, always on the verge of parody, seems one of Irish specialties. In this article, I focus on a series of works that re-deploy a single line of r…
Constitutions of Self in Contemporary Irish Poetry: ‘Into the Light’
Lyric Poetry and the Disorientation of Empathy
In the present essay, I argue that empathy constitutes the mode in which lyric poetry registers in the readers. However, unlike in prose, where the reader is allowed to empathize with the characters via the mediation of the narrator, in poetry, as Jonathan Culler and a number of other theoreticians of the lyric have indicated, the reader assumes the position of the speaker, thus becoming a re performer of the text. This positioning, in turn, crea…
Michael Kindellan, The Late Cantos of Ezra Pound: Composition, Revision, Publication, and Andrew S. Gross, The Pound Reaction: Liberalism and Lyricism in Midcentury American Literature
1. Michael Kindellan, The Late Cantos of Ezra Pound: Composition, Revision, Publication 2. Andrew S. Gross, The Pound Reaction: Liberalism and Lyricism in Midcentury American Literature London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. Pp. 288. ISBN: 9781474258753 Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2015. Pp. 262. ISBN-13: 978-3825364700 Wit Pietrzak Pound’s work continues to excite and trouble, which finds its confirmation in the critical attention given to…
Voicing the Terrestrial: Theory of the Lyric and the Pressures of the Anthropocene
In the present essay, I argue that lyric ecopoetry is particularly suited to alter our worldview in favor of a more ecologically-aware stance. In itself this position has been announced by numerous ecocritics, with some doubts as to its adequacy expressed by Timothy Clark in his Ecocriticism on the Edge . Partly in response to his critique, it is here argued that poems do offer a viable way of altering human modes of thinking not by what or how t…
Framing potentiality in Vona Groarke's X
Vona Groarke has long evoked domestic spaces as a means of self-definition in face of a fluid world. Unlike her earlier work, though, in Four Sides Full and X, she finds in architectural constructions, gardens and visual arts a liminal space in which the persona withdraws from the world of action and actuality into a state of potentiality. Although this state is fraught with painful feelings of loneliness, Groarke, in order to resist the seclusio…
Confederate Agency of Things: Maurice Scully’s Tig
The essay argues that Maurice Scully’s Tig, the concluding volume in his Things That Happen project, represents what Jane Bennett has termed confederate or distributive agency, whereby the material world, both animate and inanimate, becomes agentive through its capacity of expression. Semiotically active, things reveal a vitality and expressiveness that classic humanism regarded as solely a feature of humans. Scully’s formal experiments, discusse…
Withdrawal back to Earth: Derek Mahon’s Gaian Vision
In the present essay, Derek Mahon’s last four collections, from Life on Earth (2008) all the way to Washing Up (2020), are analysed in the context of ecology. I argue here that Mahon’s increased attention to man-caused environmental destruction is predicated on a withdrawal from the world of profit-obsessed capitalism in favour of a silent contemplation of nature, which Mahon evokes through the figure of Gaia. Relying on Bruno Latour’s revision o…
Vibrancy of nouns: Philip Terry's Quennets and the vitality of matter
The essay focuses on Philip Terry’s collection Quennets (2016), exploring its formal innovativeness, derived from the techniques of the Oulipo, as a way of evoking a vitality of matter. The idea of matter being alive is derived from Jane Bennett and connected to the idea, developed by biosemiotics, that all entities in the thingly realm are capable of generating and reading signs. It is in this dual context that Quennets is situated in order to s…
“Sympathetic Vibrations”: Music, Language and Ecology in the Poetry of Moya Cannon
The essay focuses on the poetry of Moya Cannon and her idea of poetic language as a link between people and the material environment in which they dwell. Throughout her oeuvre, Cannon shows that poetic language, which she often associates with music, is rooted in nature through its sonic organisation. The present essay sets out to demonstrate that by investigating the relationship between song, language and material environments, she seeks not on…
Resonant and regular: Silence in Derek Mahon’s later poetry and prose
Art (10 works) · Literature (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Poetry (8 works) · Aesthetics (6 works) · History (6 works) · Linguistics (6 works) · Epistemology (5 works) · Irish and British Studies (4 works) · Philosophy (4 works)