Abstrakt: | The book discusses issues from the area of imagology – interdisciplinary
studies on the perceptions of nations and countries, documented both in
texts and in the structures of languages, and of humanistic memorology –
a field that describes processes of collective memorizing, forgetting, and recollecting
facts of the past events that might have influenced the shaping of
collective memory by means of methods available to humanists (philologists,
linguists, and predominantly ethnolinguists and discourse researchers). The
article’s primary aim is to depict the evolution of – characteristic of the 20thand
21st-century Polish linguistic culture – images of nations and countries,
to present the ways they have been shaped by means of measures available
in press discourse, as well as to capture a special role of historical data predestined
by those who govern the discourse to remember or to forget. This
is connected with perceptions of proper construction of canon of values and
memory topoi of the Polish culture.
The study encompasses three time periods: the years 1942/1943, 1989/1990,
2011/2012. Out of each period two press titles of different line of ideas and
representing various communities are selected. In the case of the Second
World War (chapters entitled “1942/1943. Wojna. Czas walki o przetrwanie”
[The War: Time of Struggle for Survival]) those are “Biuletyn Informacyjny,” an underground weekly of the Home Army (Armia Krajowa) and “Nowy Kurier
Warszawski,” a rag daily published in Polish by Germans for Poles. The
analysis concerning the period of political transformation (chapters entitled
“1989/1990. Przełom. Czas przebudowy system” [Breakthrough: Time of Restructuring
the System]) includes “Gazeta Wyborcza” – associated with the
labour union “Solidarność” – and “Trybuna Ludu” – an organ of the Polish
United Workers’ Party. The last period, 2011/2012, a time of Poland’s institutional
involvement in the structures of the European Union, where the aftermath
of evolutionary transformations can be seen (Chapter Five), includes
“Uważam Rze. Inaczej pisane” (conservative) and “Polityka” (leftist).
The method applied in the book is discourse analysis. Apart from the basic
tools of cultural and cognitive linguistics, the analysis also applies some
concepts of multi-layered discourse analysis of Ingo Warnke and Jürgen
Spitzmüller, the French School of Imagology of Daniel-Henry Pageaux, and
Peter Stockwell’s cognitive poetics that has been appropriated to press texts
analysis. Introduction and Chapter One entitled “Pamięć zbiorowa a imagologiczny
aspekt dyskursu publicznego. Problemy, źródła i metody badania”
[Collective Memory and Imagological Aspect of Political Discourse. Issues,
Sources, and Research Methods] contain basic information on the issues discussed
in the book, research methods, and sources.
Chapter Two, “Konfiguracje sieci wyobrażeń o narodach i państwach
i kodowanie wyobrażonego kontekstu w tekstach” [Configuration of the
Network of Perceptions of Nations and Countries, and Coding an Imagined
Context in Texts], shows that global organisation of the network of cultural
conceptualisations can be reconstructed on the basis of press texts. They
have been grouped in appropriate clusters. The chapter presents the reasons,
ideological and pragmatic in character, that influence the grouping of nations
and taking others from the clusters of definitions in network. It also
pays attention to a changeable salience of cultural conceptualisations. In
reference to 1942/1943, they have been discussed on the examples of images
of nations and countries which took part in a war and allied blocks
(i.e. of Poland and Poles, of Germans, the Soviet Union, America, Hungary,
and of people associated
with those countries). The analysis of the period
1989/1990 shows the configuration of images of nations and countries concerning
Western countries and satellite states to the Soviet Union, as well
as the phenomenon of broadening one’s ideological space and broadening
a cluster that it motivates (on the example of the African countries: Angola,
Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and China). Chapter Three, “Dominanty tematyczne dyskursu i ich wpływ na kształtowanie
się wyobrażeń o narodach i państwach” [Discourse Thematic
Dominants and Their Impact on the Shaping of Images of Nations and
Countries], maintains that the most important themes at a time, presented
in accordance with the ideology of a given press issue, force us to adopt
a certain point of view in our perception of different nations and countries,
and in consequence, their divergent and innovative at times, characteristics.
The chapter deals with the following dominants: liquidation of the Warsaw
ghetto along with the Warsaw ghetto uprising, the Polish-Czechoslovak
confederation, the fall of Stalingrad, Katyń (1942/1943), Revolutions of 1989
and Perestroika (i.e. political transformation), and 50th anniversary of the
Second World War (1989/1990). Also, the chapter shows the impact those
dominants have on the perceptions of Poles, Germans, Russians, Czechs,
Hungarians, and Jews.
Chapter Four, “Teraźniejszość i historia. Układy pamięci zbiorowej” [The
Present and History. Patterns of Collective Memory] discusses the issues of
the conceptualisation of the communal time seen as the element of the collective
identity, and it also shows the attitude of the authors, whose writings have
been analysed, to collective identity. In both periods, the war and the breakthrough,
the focus is on the present time, a time of rapid changes; however, in
the analysed papers the evaluation of the status quo, perceptions of the role
of a man in the present time as well as vision of the future are different. Also,
the steps leading to the shaping of collective memory are different. During the
Second World War “Nowy Kurier Warszawski” (a rag daily) proposes a vision
of the future adjusted to the vision of the thousand-year Deutsches Reich, and
on behalf of the underground authorities a conspirational weekly of the Home
Army cares for a proper repetition of the elements of collective memory. In
a breaktrough period, “Trybuna Ludu” celebrates the memory of selected past
events, whereas “Gazeta Wyborcza” offers the readers history lessons on topics
hitherto undiscussed at school, sometimes providing a new interpretation.
Chapter Five, “Wyobrażenia o narodach i państwach w ewolucji” [Images
of Nations and Countries in Evolution] is devoted to the condition of discourse
in 2011/2012. Analyses of texts from weekly opinion magazines concern
the selected most crucial characteristics of Poland and Poles and their
neighbouring countries: Russia and Russians, Germany and Germans, Jews,
Czechs, Slovakians, and Hungarians. Analysing their actual descriptions,
the chapter searches for traces of the presence of conceptualisations set in the
previous epochs and innovative visions. In the Conclusion, in form of questions and answers, the author formulates
conclusions on the perceptions of nations seen as a category of collective
memory (i.e. how the way of writing about nations changes, what we remember
from past perceptions of nations, what we forget, why we constantly feel
the urge to speak about nations and their memory). |