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Brown University 2009
Film, Theater, Culture and Politics of Poland
Instructors: Michał Okłot, Ph.D., Mateusz Borowski, Ph.D., Agnieszka Morstin-Popławska, Ph.D.
This course explores the fascinating and very rich Polish twentieth-century culture with a special stress on the theatre, film, and visual arts. Since Polish culture in the twentieth-century is to a large extent a reaction to the romantic national myth formed in the nineteenth-century, the course starts with reading of the two dramas of Polish major romantic writers, Adam Mickiewicz’s Forefather’s Eve and Zygmunt Krasinski’s Un-divine Comedy.
We will start the exploration of the twentieth-century culture with works of Stanisław Wyspiański, a poet and a painter connected through his entire life with Krakow. His works give a good example of the early modernist art reacting against and assimilating the romantic tradition in literature, and fine arts; we will explore Wyspiański’s concept of the theatre and visual and decorative arts; we will visit historical sites which stimulated Wyspiański’s imagination, and see his architectonic and decorative projects, including Art Noveau stained-glass windows and polychrome in the Gothic St. Francis church in Kraków. Finally, we will examine Wyspiański’s works of applied art, whose assumption coincided with the ideas of John Ruskin, proclaiming the renaissance of art in modern life. Then we will explore the Polish avant-garde, focusing on prose of Witold Gombrowicz, and the plays of Witkacy, which anticipated the works of the European theatre of absurd.
The second part of the course will explore the Polish post-war theatre through the works of the two great reformers of the European twentieth-century theatre: Tadeusz Kantor and Jerzy Grotowski, and the Polish Film School, including films by Andrzej Wajda, Wojciech Hass, or Andrzej Munk.
Economies of Transition (Poland from the Soviet Block to the EU)
Instructor: Agnieszka Herdan, Ph.D.
The aim of the course is to present, describe and explain major social, economic and political processes that started in the late 1980-s and early 1990-s, at the time of the collapse of the communism system in Poland and East-Central Europe. The transformation of economic as well as social and political systems in Poland will be discussed on the background of changes in other East-Central European countries.
