No. 3/2011

 This paper discusses the problem of narrativity which, as a fundamental point of interest in narratology, is crucial for understanding popular culture. It considers the relationship between narrativity and tellability, interpreted as a function of an attractive topic and, as such, a property of text perception. Narrativity seems to be related to conflict as a non-reducible element of the plot. It results from a plot-building strategy where opposing protagonists are juxtaposed. In the light of postmodern narratology concepts a short story is understood as a ‘force field’ where the composition forces, which impart order to the story, cross with forces of protagonists’ subconscious aspirations and desires. This concept of a short story is applied to analyse Frederick For-syth’s novel The Day of the Jackal.

Popular literature as a phenomenon is taken for granted as something which seems to have been permanently present in the culture of 20th and 21st century. This, obviously, is a simplification: popular literature has its historic roots, going back quite far into the past, perhaps to the so called picaresque literature, or the romance novel of late antiquity. However, it is not genealogy or genology that are of particular interest here, since that those issues have been raised on numerous occasions, with abundant literature on the subject being available. The author focuses on another aspect, i.e. the art of storytelling, yet not narratives in the strict sense but the meanings behind story-teller and storytelling (the Polish terms gawędziarz or gawęda being less adequate). It is the author’s conscious choice not to use the term narrative in order to avoid its connotations in modern literary theory.Both the aforementioned terms (with their Polish equivalents) refer to a particular approach in telling a story: unconstrained and unpretentious (a style which is closer to colloquial speech than to artistic writing). The author believes that popular literature, with all its varieties, is getting closer to story-telling, even if it aspires to be ‘scientific’ (as in science fiction writing). This was observed by authors such as Stanisław Lem who, in his Philosophy of Coincidence and, most notably, in Fantasy and Futurology, drew attention to this characteristic of literature (labelled as popular), and this will be the focus of this paper.

 As popular culture evolved, the entertainment system emerged as a phenomenon within the sociology of culture. In that culture, a particular form of intertextuality is increasingly manifested. It is understood as a catalogue of themes recognised by the recipients of culture texts as invocations of previous situations, characters or fictional patterns. However, what differentiates artistic texts from popular ones is that recognising does not initiate a dialogue with tradition but, instead, remains self-sufficient. Therefore, the category of originality, as one of the features by which a culture text can be judged, is disappearing from the entertainment system. This feature, specific for the entertainment system, distinguishes that system from another phenomenon, i.e. the multimedia system, which has been increasingly marking its presence in popular culture. While the entertainment system has been evolving owing to a variety of media which refer to the existing prototypes, the multimedia system is based on the assumption that culture texts already exist in a variety of media, they are mutually complementary and simultaneously build the picture. Given the transformations of the contemporary circulation of popular culture, this phenomenon has developed a particular dimension in cyber culture. In the era of Internet expansion and transformation of consumer concepts it is relatively common for fans of a culture text to create stories inspired by that text (mostly comic strips). This phenomenon is known as fan fiction. Among texts inspired by the cyberpunk imaginarium the most extensive entertainment systems have been developed for Ghost in the Shell and Matrix.

 This paper deals with the phenomenon of fan fiction posted on the world wide web. In order to analyse it, the following e-literacy mechanisms can be employed: combinatorial construction, hybridity, seriality and repetitiveness. Those tools are used by fans (the founders of web fan fiction varieties) when creating, modifying or modelling the existing popular literary genres.The first part discusses the problem of a general definition of fan fiction. The second part focuses on the consumption of popular culture works. The term ‘consumption’ has been successfully replaced with ‘prosumption’. In this part, the author also posits that writing fanfics satisfies the need for co-participation in culture (prosumerism), a right that ordinary people currently enjoy when it comes to active co-creation of culture. Part three presents the phenomenon of cyber culture as a foundation for networked, or integrative, thinking which stems from, and leads to, co-action and co-creation.Modularity of computer-generated texts means that they consist of independent parts which can be deleted or modified. Web texts are increasingly fragmented, with their borderlines being blurred and social control over texts being undermined. Fans fill those slits with their own visions of the ending of their favourite films, movie series or books. Fan-generated texts posted on the web sometimes tackle themes which have not been explored in depth in the original text or the canonic work. Fans would produce new versions of a character’s adventures, describe sequels or prequels, with events not included in the original work (continuing fan fiction).

The paper analyses some of the most interesting Polish detective novels which belong to what Anna Martuszewska has labelled as ‘pseudo-Western-European variety of a crime novel’. The authors are two Polish writers, Maciej Słomczyński and Andrzej Szczypiorski, who use their literary pseudonyms Joe Alex and Maurice S. Andrews, respectively. Both authors use the paradigm of a detective novel based on a pattern where a murder case is solved by a talented protagonist. While those works are successful exemplifications of the pattern, some narrative hints and the plot structures indicate that both authors maintain distance from the pattern they adopted. Perhaps the most vivid example is Szczypiorski’s short story invoking famous literary detectives such as Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot, which indicates the author’s awareness of deficiencies of the pattern where conclusions arising from logical interpretation of clues are arbitrarily selected by the author from among many possibilities.

 Crime novels in Scandinavia have been extremely popular for over 150 years. However, the genre has changed and evolved from a traditional form similar to the one proposed by E.A. Poe and A. Conan Doyle, through the Swedish golden age in the 1940s and 1950s, which was compared to the British epoch of A. Christie’s success, until the 1960s when Sweden and other Scandinavian countries developed their own variant of crime novels, deeply engaged in social criticism. Later on, the model evolved but continues to be the most popular one in Northern Europe thanks to writers such as Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell or Gunnar Staalesen. This genre, whose original aim was to entertain the readers, has raised vital social issues such as multi-culturalism, alienation in big cities, failure of socialist ideals or hostility to-wards migrants in Sweden. The tremendous popularity of crime novels writ-ten by Scandinavian writers stems, among others, from their social engagement.

 Sherlock Holmes y la Sabiduría de los muertos by Rodolfo Martínez is a Spanish crime novel first published in 1990s and recently translated into Polish. Based on Arthur Conan Doyle’s crime fiction, it also contains motifs connected with occultism and fantasy as a literary genre. Using references to H.P. Lovecraft, E.A. Poe and Bram Stoker’s works, the author introduces some well-known literary characters and plots which can be associated with crime stories and with the phenomenon of ‘dark romanticism’. Thus, he plays a game with the reader and comments on the contemporary meaning of popular culture. The article aims at describing the aforementioned references to literary tradition and showing the transformation of well-known motifs in the novel.

 Role-Playing Games (RPGs) lay at the foundation of the plot of the fantasy series entitled ‘The Acts of Caine’ by Matthew Woodring Stover. The main story evolves in two different yet connected worlds. One of them, the Overworld, has attributes of fantasy whereas the other one, the Earth, bears closeness to science fiction. Earthlings consider their world real and see the Overworld as science fiction. In the Overworld, human Actors, transferred flesh and blood from real reality to virtual reality by means of newly invented technologies, assume avatar bodies and play roles in adventures according to agreed scripts. Those advanced technologies also allow the audience on Earth to connect directly to Actors’ emotions and to identify themselves with the Actors. However, it turns out that the divide between the virtual and the real world is illusory. In fact, both worlds are equally real. In consequence, the adventures cease to be solely fictitious, entertaining events and become true stories about the interference of the unknown and a mighty power ‘from the outside’. Humans are not aware of the existence of this power or of the fact that they are nothing but puppets in its hands. The series exemplifies the influence of the past on the future and makes readers realize that whatever we do changes the world in ways we cannot always predict. In that way we be-come somebody’s gods without taking any responsibility for that creature. Thus, our seemingly harmless, self-oriented actions inevitably and irreversibly change ourselves and our surroundings.

This paper focuses on the problem of fantasy universes which are among the key phenomena in the popular culture of the 20th century. Those creations, such as, e.g. the cosmic mythology by H.P. Lovecraft or the Star Wars Expanded Universe, encompass many texts drawing on the shared reservoir of characters, places and themes. The universes are organised around stories which represent the driving force for the expansion and exploration of new fictitious times and spaces. The expansion of universes and their focus on immersion encourage audiences to take a new look at the role of the plot and the represented world in popular culture. In this context, it is interesting to consider fiction games, which allow players to compile new stories within fictitious words. As such, they may serve as dynamic models to describe uni-verses, propelled by their unlimited productivity. 

This text presents the mechanisms applied by Tomasz Kołodziejczak to create the represented world while invoking Andrzej Zgorzelski’s concept of a short story cycle, Henry Jenkins’s convergence culture and market mecha-nisms. The paper analyses Kołodziejczak’s short stories and a novel pub-lished in 2006–2010. 

 Using the example of Lostpedia (the encyclopaedia of the Lost series) discusses the fan-driven creation of hypertextual encyclopaedias of worlds created in stories. Such encyclopaedias are created for numerous culture texts, particularly for stories divided into episodes, characterised by powerful suspense and a multi-layered plot.Much like other encyclopaedias for narrative culture texts, the Lostpedia may be interpreted using the category of a book or Opus Magnum of the possible world, in line with the Umberto Eco’s understanding of encyclopaedia.Despite the seemingly non-narrative nature of encyclopaedias, hypertextual encyclopaedias of stories reconfigure the presented events, usually in line with the concept of ‘plot circles’, concentrating events around the characters in their respective encyclopaedic entries. Oftentimes, such encyclopaedias contain a chronological line up of events. While an encyclopaedia as a whole is a hypertext, it enables readers to configure the events into a story which is more linear than the underlying TV series. As a work in progress, co-created and negotiated by multiple users, a hypertextual encyclopaedia also reflects a record of propositional attitudes and is a product of group perception, typical of the contemporary participative culture.

 Dies Irae: The African Adventures of Giuseppe Bergman by Milo Manara can be read at multiple levels: it plays with the form and with its own fictionality.The essential question posed by Manara’s work is: to what extent can the characters and the narrator model the represented world independently of the author? The author of this comic book was inspired by Pirandello’s drama Six Characters in Search of an Author. The first part of the comic book tack-les the problem of a character’s boundaries. Also, the characters of the comic book, much like the ones in the Italian drama, know they are fictitious. The meta-fiction theme and the questions about narrator’s actions are also raised in the second part of the comic book.Another question asked in this comic book is: if characters are drawn in a completely different convention or by another author, will it kill their identity? Does the drawing style affect the characters? How can characters ‘be themselves’? What are the boundaries in presenting a character?  In Manara’s work, the levels of narration are revealed to the audience. The structure of the text is deconstructed and narrative strategies and the structure of the comic-book universe are exposed: the author shows the constitutive elements and the role of each detail in influencing the audience.The comic book is created before the eyes of the audience. It contains reflects on the act of narrating and its characteristics.

 The author of the paper draws on his experience of work in the field of documentary films during the last ten years, as described at www.eurekamedia.info. He singles out topics which are linked to the issue of narrative in documentaries. Referring to the work of Mirosław Przylipiak, Alan Rosenthal, Michael Rabiger and Sheila Curran Bernard as well as examples from documentaries, the author reflects on three issues. Firstly, how the narrative in documentaries is changing in an era where popular culture reigns supreme in the media. Secondly, to what extent tools taken from research on the language of film can be used to analyse documentaries. Finally, and most importantly, the author reflects on the current inter-relationship between a documentary film, fiction and reality.

 The paper discusses the impact of 3D technologies on constructing narratives in contemporary film productions. The growing number and popularity of 3D film productions necessitate reflection on their formal and aesthetic aspects. Those aspects seem to be a manifestation of the contemporary convergence culture, omnipresent prosumerism and the spreading of computer games. We live in a world where, as Henry Jenkins puts it, the most important thing for popular culture is to construct ‘worlds’ of media brands where the recipient disappears and a prosumer arrives, taking an active part in co-construction of those worlds. That strategy, linked to narrative strategies in video games, is being transplanted into the art of motion pictures which, with its 3D effects, wants to engage viewers into the created world, turn recipients into ‘fellow citizens’, taking the cinema immersion experience to the extreme. Narration in contemporary 3D films, and in related popular culture products, seem to be governed by the rule which James Cameron used as an advertising slogan for his Avatar: ‘Enter the World.’

 The author shows that the plots of films which can be seen as typical mass culture products (notably those by Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and their satellites such as Robert Zemeckis or Ron Howard) are usually constructed from motives, characters or plot structures known from mythologies or fairy tales. By referring to Carl Gustav Jung’s depth psychology, the author analyses plots of movie series such as Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Back to the Future, Willow, Hook, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Hook or Poltergeist. The constitutive meanings and ideas in those films (such as the archetype of sacrifice, rivalry between father and son, character transformation, love or a maturing process enabling people to assume a position in a family) are interpreted and ‘borrowed’ by filmmakers from myths and legends such as the universal heroic monomyth, analyzed by Joseph Campbell, which is about a hero going to the underworld which helps him integrate his psyche.

Lipdubs, which are music videos, have become immensely popular recently. The author analyses the drivers behind their popularity. Why would students from nearly all major universities in the world (including the University of Warsaw) lip-dub music with synchronised lip movements? The paper goes beyond analysing lipdubs as a form of pure entertainment. Instead, it sees them as narratives about universities and their students. Using the methodology from gender studies and queer studies, the author also considers the per-ils involved with this kind of message. Can lipdubs be seen as narratives which reproduce exclusion patterns? This and other questions are posed inthe context ot this audiovisual format.

 The article discusses various aspects of narrations found in role-playing games, analyzing them from the perspective of linguistics, theory of literature and philosophy. Defining features are provided, the history of role-playing games is outlined briefly and the constituent elements of the role-play experience are characterized, such as players’ declarations and creative stances, stressing the performative and dynamic quality of resultant narratives. Then, the author proceeds to analyze the problems of communication, reception and plot in narratives generated by RPG gameplay, focusing on formal, textual and structural aspects. The author concludes that a high complexity of the subject matter requires a multidisciplinary approach and, given the absence of extensive studies of narration in role-playing games, further research is needed.

 The article shows how the plot of a computer game is depicted and assessed in press reviews. Nearly 70 texts were studied, most of them from 2010. As is the case with film and book reviews, game plots are described in the initial part of the text yet they receive considerably less attention. The plot description is dynamic (verbs in the present tense) and often connected with the description of game mechanics. A peculiar feature is that the borderline between the passive review recipient and the active game participant gets blurred (personal pronouns, verbs in 2nd person singular and 1st person plural).The plot evaluation is usually rather conventional and poorly justified. Positive assessments are mainly emotional and pragmatic (the plot is described as interesting or absorbing) or related to authors’ skills (the plot is well de-scribed or interestingly described). Substantive (e.g. conventional, vestigial) and rational (e.g. silly/puerile, incoherent) evaluations prevail in negative definitions.

 This paper centres around the relations between two relatively new elements of broadly defined popular culture, i.e. alternate history and computer games. The paper provides an overview of definitions of alternate history from culture studies in Poland and tackles the use of alternate history as a genre which is used to build plots in contemporary video games. The paper considers video games which contain elements of alternate history from a literary his-tory perspective as well as cultural and literary perspective.

The author attempts to highlight the emergence of a new type of narrative in philosophy which uses popular literature and interacts with it. In this article various works by S. Zizek, U. Eco and M. Epstein are analyzed taking into consideration the philosophers’ fascination with popular literature and its genres. The author shows how this literature interacts with the contemporary theoretical and philosophical discourse, how it serves as an exemplification of philosophical notions and terms, a ‘partner’ in the story about modern arts faculty or a way to introduce theory. The author also highlights the way philosophers get into wide circulation and how they build their fame through popular literature. 

 Today, Philip K. Dick is commonly acknowledged as one of the major authors in science fiction literature. Described as ‘the Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky and Hemingway of SF’ and ‘the Melville and Kafka of the 20th century’ or ‘the American Borges’, he is an unquestionable master of the genre and his works have been praised by prominent philosophers, cultural theorists, thinkers and literary scholars, among them such highly influential names as Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson or Slavoj Žižek.Meanwhile, the image of this American writer from the perspective of Polish readers seems heavily simplified, and opinions held among the Polish audience can be sometimes be strict, if not unjust.This paper wonders if science fiction literature, i.e. popular literature which many literary critics and theorists consider ‘low’ or of little value, can ask philosophical, moral or existential questions, such as those asked by Philip K. Dick in his novels and short stories. The central question about the essence and nature of God was the driving force behind his writing. This very issue is the focus of Dick’s most mature literary achievements. He was particularly inspired by Valentinian gnostic tradition, adopting the symbolism, themes or style and structure of artistic expression from that doctrine and transforming them at liberty within his prose. The literary outcomes of this inspiration, such as The Divine Invasion or The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, are still admired today by readers around the world who consider Dick as an undisputable talent in this literary genre.

 The main aim of this article is to highlight the ‘life is a dream’ topos in its various semantic variants: from the epistemological theme to a metaphorical expression describing the reality. The point of reference is the literary tradition (e.g. Shakespeare, Calderon) and philosophical tradition (e.g. Descartes), where this topos shaped the structure of meaning throughout the ages. In Solaris, the topos of oneiric reality becomes one of the key devices to organise the represented world. Lem draws on the old literary tradition of life seen as a dream, and on philosophical epistemological questions posed through the life-dream opposition, in order to use the fantasy staffage of his novel to invoke the eternal question about the capabilities of human cognition.

This article focuses on images of the Warsaw Uprising and, more broadly, of World War II, found in Polish (and European) popular music. The textual layer, accompanying music and, occasionally, visuals are analysed. This re-search idea was pursued on the basis of a variety of music genres: rock (Lao Che, De Press), hip hop (Zipera, Hemp Gru) and experimental music (L.U.C.), thus revealing openness of popular culture to topics previously re-served for ‘high culture’. The analysis also revealed a social change in the paradigm of thinking about key historical events. Sophisticated artistic renderings also have utilitarian aspects: by reaching a broad audience they sensi-tise people to the idea of discovering the roots and, therefore, after Simone Weil, to ‘being rooted’. 

This paper tackles the relations between hip hop music and postmodern axiology. One fundamental characteristic of hip hop is its ironic distance to-wards its own language, constructed on top of various official discourses, and subjected to certain rules. Within the postmodern aesthetics, certain elements are appropriated and modified, and styles are mixed, and all of those devices are typically found in hip hop. With regard to axiology, hip hop fits into the tradition of rebellion as a movement which dissents the modern culture while aiming to achieve a social change. This characteristic of hip hop is connected with its genologic feature: narratives on exclusion of social minorities. More-over, third-party texts are part of the interplay in the Polish hip hop, used as a source material for building new messages. Many Polish hip hop songs contain themes which can be interpreted in the context of philosophical perspectives on postmodernity. 

 The paper presents the highly interesting works by Ivan Vyrypaev. A few years ago Vyrypaev was considered ‘only’ to be a Russian iconoclastic drama writer. Today he is known as an actor, director, screenwriter, man of letters and celebrity. The authors of this paper focus on the presence of popular culture in the mass media and its linguistic, iconic and audiovisual forms since all those elements can be found in Vyrypaev’s plays and films. The paper reflects on the plurality of narrative dis-courses in the analysed literary works as well as games with (popular) culture played at all levels of its construction: games with cultural codes, genres, intertextuality etc. All the tricks used by Vyrypaev allow him to move with confidence within the vast space of popular culture without depriving his oeuvre of individual and reasonable reflection on culture, where Vyrypaev is both a participant and a victim.

The paper discusses the ways HIV/AIDS is presented in Polish soap operas: ‘Klan’, ‘M jak miłość’ and ‘Na Wspólnej’.Who are Poles living with AIDS or infected with HIV? What was the source of the infection? How did their relatives react to the news about the infection or the disease? Do the authors of the series employ on stereotypical beliefs about HIV/AIDS or they try to avoid or subvert them? These are some of the questions addressed in the paper. In the 21st century it is not only health care that is vested with the task of HIV prevention. Television may perhaps also play an important role as a popular source of information which is why the question about the image of HIV/AIDS in soap operas seems important.

 This paper presents conclusions from studies on the characteristics of television commercials structured as TV series. This phenomenon, which has recently gained popularity, was driven by the widespread fatigue with advertising, confirmed by numerous studies. The idea of TV series as a device to construct commercial messages is selected due to the popularity of this genre among TV audiences, appreciated for its entertainment value, the possibility to follow favourite characters (actors) and derive satisfaction from anticipating plot twists and turns. Advertisers draw on this knowledge to construct TV spots, as analysed in the paper. In the context of this discussion it is important to consider whether the selection of this popular format, appreciated by view-ers, will necessarily influence their consumer choices.

 Social advertising, notably shockvertising, uses images to tell stories. Those stories are told using carefully selected tools, through images of people, objects, colours etc. By noticing and defining the relations between them, recipients are supposed to read, and also to interpret, the story. Such a story, as noticed by O. Toscani, is not necessarily identical with the author’s intent. An attempt at exploring how social advertising uses images to tell stories also inspires the question about analysis and interpretation of images. This paper also attempts to demonstrate that social advertising stimulates, or even pro-vokes, change at the level of social message and execution.The article presents the challenging messages authored by Oliviero Toscani (contained in Benetton advertising executions), none of which are immediate or direct. By confronting emotions and ideas on a very general plane, those messages evoke extreme emotions. By exploiting rather controversial areas, on the brink of good taste, those messages are always different, relational, depending heavily on the recipient.Toscani’s communication is certainly original and captivating. In order to understand it, one should first plough one’s way through interpretation of the expressive and bold social messages, which is by no means easy. They represented, and still do, a voice in the quest for tolerance and respect for the Other, and help for those whose lives have been ruined by war, famine or diseases. Owing to their potential intertextuality, those messages continue to evoke emotional reactions, from protests to delight, among audiences world-wide.

 This paper focuses on the significance of images in contemporary advertising. Today’s advertisements tell stories mostly through images, putting less emphasis on the role of words. As such, this paper focuses on image-based narratives which draw on the reservoir of signs associated with Christianity. It presents the methodological assumptions behind advertising imagery, with a special emphasis on content analysis methodologies drawing on structural-ism, semiology, hermeneutics and discourse studies as the key tools in visual sociology. The paper also tackles the meanings of photographic images de-noting the reality and connoting additional, hidden senses. The author additionally backs her claims by referring to developments in cognitive linguistics. The practical part will include selected advertising photos based on the Jesus Christ’s Last Supper theme and interpretation of their content.

 One unconventional narrative is the story of sexuality in popular culture or, rather, the story of problems with finding the right words to talk about sexuality. The language emerges as a barrier in observation and description of sexuality. Whenever we begin to talk, we immediately find ourselves moving within the realm of stereotypes and myths. Instead of getting closer to the experience, its description and meaning, we build yet another level of fiction.Breaking free from the imperative of naming and, instead, turning towards the discovery of meanings hidden in bodily responses, means that the discourse of privacy finds due appreciation. However, areas which are unnamed and undefined are usually treated (also by ourselves) as second rate. Moreover, this space is highly clichéd because the Polish language does not have a sufficient repertoire of the ‘right’ words while it does suffer from overrepresentation of obscenities. As a result, the realm of sex life is subjected not only to intense moral control but also to systematic exclusion. Unavailability of language, no possibilities to tell stories, and the inadequacy of existing words – all of them lead to discursive deficits in narratives concerning sex and sexuality.Despite the progressing sexualisation of public life, the Polish language still lacks words to name sex organs and to describe sexual behaviours. This indicates the need to find the right narrative for sexuality but also shows that this domain is heavily tabooed. On the one hand, we are dealing with the entertainment aspect of sex life and, on the other, with excessive seriousness. In the light of those processes it is interesting to analyse, from a sociological perspective, the form and content of two children’s books which have established themselves in Polish popular culture. Those books, authored by two Swedish authors: Dan Höjer and Gunilla Kvarnström, aim to detaboo narratives about sexuality. On the other hand, attention should also be given to books for the youngest children which introduce this sphere of narration.

 The links between contemporary Croatian literature and music are very varied and reflect authors’ diversified strategies. This paper presents three of them: references to musical notation, inspirations from classic music forms such as a fugue or a rondo, and references to popular music in poetry and prose. Musical inspirations in Croatian literature can be viewed as illustrations of the broader phenomenon of intermediality and, as such, fall within the context of multiple related phenomena such as concrete poetry, links between literature and films, radio or music videos.