Joanna Hobot-Marcinek

dr hab. Professor at the Jagiellonian University, literature scholar, methodologist and theatrologist, employee of the Department of Polish Studies Teacher Training Education, head of the Centre for Multimodal Educational and Cultural Research (OMBEiK).

From 2015 to 2021 she was the head of the Multimodal Educational Strategies Workshop (PMSE) at the Faculty of Polish Studies at the Jagiellonian University. She is a long-time lecturer of the Postgraduate Rhetoric Study at the Faculty of Polish Studies at the Jagiellonian University and its head in the academic year 2007/2008. She is the head of research grants financed by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education and the Polish National Science Centre: The Dionysian Lady and the phantasmagoria of death (2007-2010) and Image of anus ebria et delirans in European culture (Middle Ages – 19th century) (2013-2016). She is a member of the Editorial Committee of the Figurae Series and the Narracje w eduk@cji Series of the Jagiellonian University Press. She was awarded the Prize of His Magnificence Rector of the Jagiellonian University in 2001, 2010, 2013, 2017. For many years she was a member of the Scientific Council of the Henryk Jordan Kraków Youth Society of Friends of Science and Arts. Since 2023, she has been a member of the Polish Archaeological Institute at Athens. She is also a member of the Audit Committee of the Polish Community Association. She has delivered and still delivers BA, MA, postgraduate and doctoral courses. She has promoted more than 50 master’s degrees. In 2022, she was awarded the Silver Medal for Long Service.

She is involved in literary and methodological research with a particular focus on issues such as: the impact of communist censorship on the shape of literature and culture in the second half of the 20th century, the senile works of ‘great masters’, the cultural image of female old age in literature and art, the reception of ancient topos in contemporary culture, stereotypes in culture and education and multimodal forms of literary and cultural education in school and university education.

She is currently preparing a monograph on the contemporary reinterpretations of the sympotic poetics in the senile works of Tadeusz Różewicz. As co-editor, she is participating in the work on the collective volume Technopaideia. Zaawansowane technologie w edukacji – perspektywa humanistyczna (Eng. Technopaideia. Advanced technologies in education – a humanistic perspective) (the Jagiellonian University Press, Narracje w eduk@cji series).

Books

Gra z cenzurą w poezji Nowej Fali: 1968-1976, Wydawnictwo Literackie, Kraków 2000.

Stara Baba i Goethe. Doświadczenie i transgresja starości. Tadeusz Różewicz, Czesław Miłosz, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, Kraków 2012.

Stara Rebeliantka. Studia nad semantyką obrazu, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, Kraków 2010, współautorka.

Anty-Beatrycze: studia nad kulturową historią obrazu pijanej i szalonej staruchy, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, Kraków 2016, współautorka.

Technopaideia. Zaawansowane technologie w edukacji humanistycznej, red. S. Borowicz, J. Hobot-Marcinek, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, Kraków 2024.

Journal articles and chapters in collective publications

Mass media under censorial surveillance: politics in press in the Polish People’s Republic of the 1960s and 70s, in: Politics and the media in Poland from the 19th to the 21st centuries: selected issues, ed. E. Kristanova, R. Habielski, M. Such-Pyrgiel, Leiden, Boston, Brill 2024.

Multimodalna polonistyka w epoce technologicznego przesilenia, w: Technopaideia. Zaawansowane technologie w edukacji humanistycznej, red. S. Borowicz, J. Hobot-Marcinek, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, Kraków 2024.

In vino veritas, in aqua sanitas. La poétique sympotique dans le poéme “tempus fugit…” de Tadeusz Różewicz, „Roczniki Humanistyczne”, Zeszyt z Filologii Klasycznej z materiałami z sesji Les poétiques sympotiques – Sympotic poetics . Publikacja przewidziana w 2024 r.

Eremici i sympozjaści: Ryszard Przybylski i Tadeusz Różewicz – listy, wiersze, rozmowy, w: „Prace Polonistyczne” 2022, nr 77.

Okręt Rzeczpospolitej między etnosem, etosem a eidosem w edukacji polonistycznej, w: Lekcja POLSKI(ego). Praktyki edukacyjne wobec niepokojów XXI wieku, red. A. Gis, K. Koc, M. Kwiatkowska -Ratajczak, M. Wobalis, Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, Poznań 2021.

I am a literature scholar, methodologist and theatre scholar. I conduct research on the Polish People’s Republic censorship, interdisciplinarity and multimodality of Polish Studies education, cultural transformations of the topos of the old, intoxicated woman and the mechanism of functioning of stereotypes in culture. I am currently working on Tadeusz Różewicz’s symposia and modern reinterpretations of the sympotic poetics characteristic of this poet’s senile work.

I am active in the Polish Community Association, whose goal is to enable Poles from the East to have contact with their Motherland. For years, I have been teaching Polish language and culture to our compatriots from Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan or Belarus. I am involved in disseminating knowledge about the destructive influence of censorship on literature, culture and social reality, taking part in radio programmes or panel discussions devoted to this subject.

I like crime fiction, especially retro literature, Rilke’s poetry and the oneiric worlds of Bruno Schulz. I am an enthusiast of skiing, the Polish and Slovak Tatra Mountains, Beskid Makowski, as well as active holidays at the Baltic Sea and further and closer travels to France, Italy, Greece, Spain, Turkey, Ukraine and Romania.

I like Mediterranean and Far Eastern cuisine and wandering in the footsteps of the Romantics in Lebanon, Crimea, St. Petersburg or Paris. Kraków is my place on earth, although I am also attracted to the ancient-Christian heritage of Rome and the rhythm of life in Madrid.

Every decision to mutilate own work posed a serious moral dilemma for the authors, who were forced to make compromises in order to avoid having their work detained by the Main Office for the Control of the Press, Publications and Public Performances. Probably many poets, including New Wave poets, would have endorsed the words addressed by Mickiewicz to Czeczot: “I allowed [this paragraph] to be thrown out, as if I allowed my eye to be plucked out to save my head”. Following the example of tsarist censorship, the Polish People’s Republic censorship did not recognise “literature as such, i.e. free and independent”.

Gra z cenzurą w poezji Nowej Fali (1968-1976), Wydawnictwo Literackie, Kraków 2000.

The impairment of thinking in favour of action, proper to the Dewey’s school, stems from the author of Democracy and Education‘s conviction that only thinking that is directly linked to increased productivity in action makes sense. Meanwhile, for Hanna Arendt, thinking in itself, understood as a momentary withdrawal from the world and the entering into dialogue with oneself, has (to use an oxymoron) a positively-destructive power: the power to undermine superstitions, top-down imposed rules or generalisations. Moreover, it should lead first to an act of judgement, which only then leads to action.

Dlaczego klasycy?: o zagrożeniach i perspektywach ponowoczesnej edukacji polonistycznej, w: Edukacja polonistyczna jako zobowiązanie: powszechność i elitarność polonistyki, red. E. Jaskółowa, D. Krzyżyk, B. Niesporek-Szamburska, M. Wójcik-Dudek, D. Jagodzińska, A. Zok-Smoła, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, Katowice 2016.

The Old Masters therefore contrast the monumental model of the poet-sage-philosopher, treated as a sign of approaching death, with the figure of the unruly old man, who exposes the shortcomings of his own old age and its comedy, which for them is synonymous with immersion in life, with an attempt to preserve one’s dignity and escape death. Following the example of the Dionysian Lady, they give the venerable and subject to cultural facelift countenance of old age a bacchic, ironic and at the same time clownish smile, located somewhere between this world and the other, culture and nature, spirit and body.

Stara Baba i Goethe. Doświadczenie i transgresja starości (Tadeusz Różewicz, Czesław Miłosz, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz), Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, Kraków 2012.

The Różewicz’s symposion described in tempus fugit… is, obviously, a symposion à rebours. Instead of mature men and adolescents with beautiful bodies, there are three old men. The ritual drinking of diluted wine is replaced by the principle “in vino veritas, in aqua sanitas” (“in wine truth, in water health”), to be observed by those in the death row cell – the human body. Instead of symposion-style displays of fitness, Różewicz ostentatiously emphasises the maladaptation to the world of those who do not, as the poet writes, “drive a car,” do not use a mobile phone, e-mail, a “compiuter” or a bug, and who suffer from disabilities associated with advanced age, such as deafness, for example. There are also no hetairas, dancers or beautiful epheboi at Różewicz’s symposion, and the only erotic figure is the number 69, which corresponds to the age of Peter who is the youngest of the feasting men-convicts.

Sympozjony i misteria: Tadeusza Różewicza rozmowy o sztuce, w: Międzyliteratura jako przestrzeń dialogu: studia dedykowane pamięci Profesor Anny Pilch, red. A. Włodarczyk, S. Borowicz, K. Wawer, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, Kraków 2022.

Celestina, the title character of a Spanish drama by Ferdinand de Rojas, is the patron of discussions on Renaissance fates of characters and the anus ebria motif. This character, born at the dawn of an age of national literatures guided in its aesthetics by the principle of imitating antique models, was the result of the processing of Greek and Roman motifs and topoi, which, as a consequence of the procedures applied, began to function in new contexts and perform a new socio-cultural function. It is therefore not just a matter of historical interpretation of the figure of Celestine, but also of showing the phenomenon of the cultural vitality of a character who became, not only for the Spanish-speaking world, but also for the entire Western culture, a model cliché of a cunning, ruthless, talkative, morally uninhibited, socially excluded, although indispensable for everyone, old procurer who does not refuse wine and supports her actions with black magic.

Dychotomie – wiek XVI (literatura), w: S. Borowicz, J. Hobot-Marcinek, R. Przybylska, Anty-Beatrycze: studia nad kulturową historią obrazu pijanej i szalonej staruchy, red. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, Kraków 2016.

Joanna Hobot-Marcinek

Books

Journal articles and chapters in collective publications

bio LIFESTYLE

Joanna Hobot-Marcinek