Tom 15 (2023): Zeszyt 1 (June 2023)

Fantasy requires a probabilistic theory of reasoning to explore how it enables the observer to create mental images from uncertainty. This study proposes a quantum cognitive approach to fantasy used for disclosing mental models of the character in uncertainty. For the uncertain individual, there exists a multiplicity of mentally incompatible but equally valid and complete representations (mental pictures) of the world. Contextualizing fantasy within the quantum cognitive principles, the novel Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush (1982) by Virginia Hamilton has been taken into consideration. In this novel the hesitation between psychological and supernatural explanations interrupts the predictive power about the real and affects mental models or cognitive states of the young character of the novel as the observer. The process of representing fantasy through complementarity, one of the quantum cognitive principles, shows that fantasy is a mixed state with a familiar probabilistic combination of states which reflect incomplete knowledge. The quantum principle of superposition has been used to explain the way an introspective mental experiment is initiated by the observer but not completed. The decision made by the observer is not a deterministic process that converges to a single mental representation. Rather it can evolve forever. To sum up, this article marks how quantum cognition can describe the uncertainty principle both on an emotional-behavioural and structural level when the observer entangles themselves within the irreducible indeterminacy of reality within fantasy.

This paper examines the definition of the Victorian upper-class woman in the context of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan, in light of the prevailing gender roles and conventions of the late Victorian era. Drawing upon Judith Butler’s theories of sex and gender, this study investigates Victorian female subjectivity in terms of the power dynamics between men and women. Drawing upon Butlerian analyses of sex and gender, this paper has explored two divergent representations of upper-class female subjectivity in the Victorian period. The representation of intelligible-gendered identities in the Duchess of Berwick is a key point of consideration when examining Victorian upper-class female subjects. In contrast, Mrs. Erlynne serves as an example of an unintelligible-gendered character, allowing for an exploration of the ramifications of challenging the prevailing power structure. In this article, it is demonstrated that Wilde’s female ideal is neither definitively intelligible-gendered nor unintelligible-gendered; rather, she is a figure who resists power and reacts to any perceived threats to her social standing. This article posits that Wilde’s ideal woman is a semi-intelligible-gendered identity. Furthermore, it is suggested that, despite his advocacy of Women’s rights, Wilde still endorses certain gender roles and binary oppositions between the sexes, one of which is the role of motherhood. Wilde illustrates a scenario in which breaking away from these social conventions would lead to a tragic end which no woman is able to escape.

Violence in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet follows stage-managed theatrics at the level of the language and images used, the construction of a theatre that comments on theatre, and of staged minds. The theatrics of images, sound, stage and mind are necessary steps for Hamlet to create a meta-self. Metatheatre and the grotesque are deeply connected to violence; their association makes what the research calls the meta-self. The article combines different theoretical concepts not commonly used simultaneously. The alliance between the carnivalesque and the metatheatrical reveals the theatrics of the stage while dealing with violence. The theatrics of violence are present at the level of performance, language and images. The dynamics of violence constructed upon theatrics and staging prove that the mind of Hamlet is staged. Baudrillard’s concepts of “hyperreality”, “traversing the self” and “holographic attempts” allow us to conclude that Hamlet reaches a “meta-self”. The Meta-self is a traversing self that challenges society and mocks over-confidence; it operates as a mirror, a crossing-thinking self in constant rehearsal and reassessment of the certitudes of humans.

The paper seeks to explore the motif of blood, as it appears in various forms in all civilizational and cultural areas. Based on the genre- and culturally diverse texts from the material sample, the authors will present the basic and plot-motif stable forms of the blood motif in ancient culture-forming narratives and outline their archetypal significance.

Given how rapidly the still-ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has receded from the public consciousness since 2021, the time is ripe to revisit how Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Carlos Fuentes’s Aura inform our present historical moment, particularly since both texts are concerned with the large-scale disappearance, erasure and repression of the mass-dead by statist economic interests in the wake of national traumas – post-Vichy France and post-Famine Ireland in the case of Beckett, and the French Intervention and the Spanish Conquest in the case of Mexico. Yet these two seminal works are not only concerned with how statist interests erase their dead, but how these same dead continue to haunt, influence and impact these same nations despite – or even because of – their erasure. As we are once again recognizing in our own “post”-pandemic moment, just because the dead have been erased, that by no means signifies they are silent.

The paper discusses the idea of origin, and the cinematic representation as a means of expression for specific cultural identity. Deriving its theoretical background from the understanding of cultural memory by Assman (1995, via Warburg, 1924 - 1929), and the concept of cultural identity as hybrid (Hall, 1998) the paper argues that the films Jánošík (1921), and Smoke Signals (1998) are examples of sovereign cinematic representations of respective cultural identities (Slovak, and Native American), and both construct cultural identity as hybrid, standing in between, or embracing multiple discourses. Through the depiction of their characters, and opening scenes the article examines the complexity of the film representations as they compromise or subvert existing stereotypes.