Existential Meanders of Bloody Ignorant Apes Waiting as the Organising Principle of Existence Bobrowicz, Katarzyna Published in: A Roundtable on Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 2014 Document Version: Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): Bobrowicz, K. (2014). Existential Meanders of Bloody Ignorant Apes: Waiting as the Organising Principle of Existence. In P. Wojtas (Ed.), A Roundtable on Interdisciplinary Literary Studies (pp. 23-31). Faculty of Artes Liberales, University of Warsaw. 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LUND UNIVERSITY PO Box 117 221 00 Lund +46 46-222 00 00 ISBN: 978-83-63636-15-9 A Roundtable on Interdisciplinary Literary Studies Publisher: Wydział "Artes Liberales" Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego ul. Nowy Świat 69 00-046 Warszawa This publication is funded by The Artes Liberales Institute Foundation Warsaw 2014 Editor: Dr Paweł Wojtas Reviewers: Prof. dr hab. Piotr Wilczek Dr Matthew Foley Cover design: Faculty of "Artes Liberales" University of Warsaw Print: © Copyright by Faculty of "Artes Liberales" University of Warsaw Acknowledgements Heartfelt thanks should go firstly to the students of Faculty of Artes Liberales, University of Warsaw, the contributors of this publication which was conceived in collaboration throughout the undergraduate course “Contemporary Anglo- American Literature in Context”. Special thanks also go to Dr Adrian Hunter for his expert opinions in his contribution to this volume. As regards the preparation of the current manuscript, we would like to thank Dr Matthew Foley for reviewing and looking over this volume. Lastly, but by no means least, we extend our gratitude to Professor Piotr Wilczek for overseeing this project. Contents Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................... 3 Introduction Paweł Wojtas .................................................................................................................. 7 How Does Evil Relate to Civilization? A Study of Correlation between Evil and Civilization in William Golding’s Works in the Context of the Views of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau Julia Naumowicz ........................................................................................................... 11 Existential Meanders of Bloody Ignorant Apes: Waiting as the Organising Principle of Existence Katarzyna Bobrowicz .................................................................................................... 23 Contemporary Landscape in Being and Time: Comparative Analysis of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Martin Amis’s Dead Babies Ryszard Bobrowicz ........................................................................................................ 33 Maxwell Demon as a Hegemonic Ruler: Politics in Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 Antoni Głowacki ............................................................................................................ 45 William Gibson’s Neuromancer as Phantasmagoria of Fear in Contemporary American Society Aleksandra Paszkowska ................................................................................................ 57 Why Would Wolverine Join in with Case and Wintermute?: An Investigation into a Relation between Cyberpunk in Novels and Comic Books Oskar Lubiński .............................................................................................................. 69 Forsaking the False Gods: Philosopher’s Analytic Approach to Cyberpunk Literature Wojciech Mamak .......................................................................................................... 81 Interpretation of Michel Houellbecq's The Map and the Territory in the Context of Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation Filip Rak ........................................................................................................................ 91 Spectres of Posts- and -Isms Adrian Hunter, Paweł Wojtas ....................................................................................... 99 Authors’ biodata .......................................................................................................... 107 Introduction Paweł Wojtas For want of a word that would best capture the collective efforts that made possible the publication of this volume, roundtable lends itself as the most accurate for good reason. This publication consists of a collection of academic papers that emerged as a result of a lively collaboration with my students – who act as contributors to this volume - throughout the undergraduate course Contemporary Anglo-American Literature in Context I taught at Faculty of Artes Liberales of University of Warsaw in 2012. The roundtable discussions generating a plethora of productive thoughts on some aspects of 20th century Anglo- American literature would later be consolidated as term papers, the revised version of which is now extended before the reader’s eyes. If this sounds like a hoary old chestnut (indeed another book that seeks to recapitulate some well-worn aspects and concepts of contemporary literature would be just too much of a good thing) the ways in which the contributors breathe life into the relatively exhausted literary debate deserve due attention. Namely, the authors are in the most part interdisciplinary students completing combined undergraduate modules in arts and humanities (e.g. Social Science, Philology, Philosophy, Cultural Studies, Law Studies, to list but a few). Such a reading practice differs markedly from traditional ways of approaching the literary text, with benefits of this slant being twofold: firstly, a broad gamut of scholarly angles from which the authors close-read literature eschews hermetic interpretative closure symptomatic of literary scholars’ exclusionist reading; secondly, given the essentially academic character of the publication, it takes pains to offer inquisitive readings flying in the face of instrumentalist interpretation characteristic of some lower orders of Cultural Studies. In a daring attempt to bridle the topically miscellaneous pieces, the chapters are arranged chronologically. In the opening chapter Julia Naumowicz attempts to interrogate aspects of human nature, civilization and savagery in William 7 Paweł Wojtas Golding’s early prose centring on the relationship between evil and civilization. Placed in the context of philosophical theories of Rousseau, Hobbes and Locke, the author attempts to elucidate the ways in which civilization and savagery affect the human nature via Golding’s lens. In chapter 2, interdisciplinary – philosophical and ethological – at its core, Katarzyna Bobrowicz’s reading of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot rehashes some crucial aspects of this much-debated play. Drawing on Heidegger and Rilke, the author probes existential meanders of a (non)human condition. This is to test the culturally sanctified limits between humanity and animality by unsettling their clean-cut epistemological locus. Katarzyna Bobrowicz persuasively argues that Beckett’s text demonstrates this existential liminality in the ways that eschew explicatory narrative stances or affirmative gestures. Instead it provokes by dramatizing these fundamental, yet uncharted, philosophical and phenomenological queries. In a similar existential breath, Ryszard Bobrowicz embarks on a comparative analysis of Beckett’s and Martin Amis’ works so as to revisit some central philosophical and ontological questions. The notions of being and time, as demonstrated by the writers in question, both extend and unsettle the spaces of interiority and exteriority manipulating the characters’ representation and consciousness. These deliberations, however, zoom in to a total cultural context exposing the ways both Beckett and Amis appropriate these tropes to lay bare their prophetic project: a dystopian vision of the modern human being entangled in the irresolvable spatio-temporal existential aporias. Delving into postmodern aesthetics, Antoni Głowacki offers a playful anthropologically-oriented reading of Crying of Lot 49, proposing that the notion of ‘hegemony’ helps establish a systematic angle from which to approach the novel. The author argues that the novel can be interpreted as a statement on meta- political level and a narrative about power relations. Conceptualising her own account of the literary, Aleksandra Paszkowska militantly argues in chapter 5 that literature heavily depends on universality for its existence. If this reads like a sweeping statement, the author, by placing it against