The UW Slavic Department presents a lecture “Revolutionary Subjecthood of the Interwar Poetry in Poland: Traumatized Selves and Heterogeneous Subjectivities in Tytus Czyżewski’s Writing” by Dr. Agnieszka Jeżyk.

This talk focuses on the influence that World War I had on the notion of subjecthood of one of the most important Polish avant-garde groups, the futurists. Even today contemporary criticism more frequently presents the first works of authors such as Bruno Jasieński, Jerzy Jankowski, and Tytus Czyżewski as a light-hearted humorous experiment than a deliberate philosophical proposition. Dr. Jeżyk will argue that dramatic historical upheavals of the early 20th century fundamentally impacted these poets’ critical tone. Her case study is the poetic evolution of the subject in Tytus Czyżewski’s poems from the “traumatic selves” in the 1920 collection Green Eye. Formist Poetry. Electric Visions to “heterogenous subjects” in the 1922 volume Night-Day. Mechanical Electric Instinct. Psychoanalysis, disability studies, post-structuralism, and electricity studies inspired the theoretical framework of the talk.

Dr. Agnieszka Jeżyk specializes in the Polish avant-garde poetry of the interwar period and Slavic horror studies. She has published in The Polish Review, Canadian Slavonic Papers, Slavic and East European Journal, Ab Imperio, among others. She is a co-editor of the volume Slavic Horror across the Media: Cursed Zones forthcoming in Manchester University Press in 2023. Agnieszka Jeżyk earned her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago for her thesis on the excessive matter in Bruno Jasieński’s poems. She is working on a manuscript discussing marginal subjectivities in the 1920s Polish avant-garde poetry. Her other project focuses on the representations of deadly technologies in various Central European avant-garde works. She has worked at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of California Los Angeles, and most currently at the University of Toronto, Canada, where she was an Assistant Professor of Polish Language, Literature, and Culture and an Acting Director of the Polish Program.

This lecture is free and open to the public. Zoom link: https://washington.zoom.us/j/99211800349

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