Autor rekonstruuje romantyczną koncepcję wyobraźni, zwracając uwagę na jej związki z tradycją ezoteryczną, następnie pokazuje znaczenie idei wyobraźni dla refleksji pedagogicznej w okresie romantyzmu. W artykule zostaje także podjęty wątek trwałości romantycznych idei w dwudziestym wieku, ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem kontrkultury młodzieżowej XX wieku oraz związków między kontrkulturową koncepcją wyobraźni a dyskursem o wychowaniu.

This article concerns “living zones of the imagination”—areas of social life in which intensive “interpretive labor” is underway. Thanks to these zones, it is possible to engage in universally accepted exercises that enable a person to “see the world through the eyes of another person” and that yet do not disturb the current socio-cultural order. They provide an important basis for understanding among people, for harmonizing meanings in the sphere of social realities, and for integration that goes beyond certain permanent boundaries and hierarchies. The basic aim of the article is to prove that hospitality, understood as a value in Polish culture, could contribute to a considerable degree to the creation of such zones. The author analyzes the zones’ character, function, and meaning, paying attention to how they resist the expansion of bureaucratic ways of organizing social life. He also draws attention to the influence that an axio-normative pattern could have within specific models of behavior and cultural practices. Key words: hospitality, resistance practices, social imagination, interpretive labor

Bulgarian migration to the UK has gradually increased since the country’s EU accession and the re-moval of barriers to free movement of labour across the EU. The sustained popularity of the UK amongst those dreaming for a fresh start through migration, despite the hostility faced by Bulgarian immigrants, poses a paradox that cannot be explained with the ‘push–pull’ and cost–benefit calculation models pre-vailing in migration research. This article proposes a more balanced understanding of migration moti-vations on the basis of would-be migrants’ own perceptions. Drawing on biographical interviews with self-ascribed ‘ordinary people’ with long-term plans for settling in the UK, I shed light on individuals’ imaginings and expectations of life after migration. Firstly, I analyse the notion of ‘survival’ through which my informants articulated frustrations with their precarious financial situation, their inferior social and symbolic positioning within society and their inability to partake in forms of consumption and lifestyle that would allow them to experience a sense of social advancement. I then explore would-be migrants’ imaginings of life in the UK (and ‘the West’) which depict an idealised ‘normality’ of life, in which they conveyed longings for security and predictability of life, social justice and working-class dignity and respectability. These insights into people’s disappointment, desperation and disillusionment with a precarious present help us to understand the continuous construction of an ‘imaginary West’ as an ideal ‘elsewhere’, in the search of which migrants are ready to undergo hardship and stigmatisation. By engaging with the existing debates in migration studies and literature on Bulgarian migration, this article exposes the deficiencies of economic reductionism, which presents migration decision-making as a conscious, rational and calculative act and, instead, demonstrates that, very often, people are led by dreams and idealisations that are reflective of their emotions and life-worlds.

Głównym zadaniem wyobraźni w teorii dzieła literackiego Romana Ingardena jest odtwarzanie przedmiotów i wyglądów opisanych w dziele literackim oraz uzupełnianie ich schematycznego opisu o dodatkowe szczegóły zgodne z treścią dzieła. Wyobraźnia przyczynia się więc istotnie do wytworzenia konkretyzacji dzieła. Pozostałe wyobrażenia, przede wszystkim twórcze wyobrażenia autora oraz swobodne inspiracje czytelników, nie należą już do dzieła, zgodnie z postulatem antypsychologizmu. Ingarden pojmuje wyobraźnię w sposób tradycyjny, jako władzę przeżywania obrazów myślowych. Nie wiąże pojęcia wyobraźni z nadawaniem znaczenia wypowiedziom fikcyjnym, fantastycznym, metaforycznym i symbolicznym. Jeśliby jednak przyjąć właśnie taką koncepcję wyobraźni, którą można nazwać semiotyczną, obecność wyobraźni w dziele rozszerzy się do wszystkich czterech jego warstw, a sam Ingardenowski „ quasi‑sąd” będzie można uznać za „zdanie wyobraźniowe”.

Sophie de Grouchy w swych Listach o sympatii (1798) analizuje pojęcie sympatii, wychodząc od krytyki Teorii uczuć moralnych Adama Smitha. Zwraca uwagę, że sympatyzowanie z innymi w ich radości sprawia nam przyjemność, dobro innych nas cieszy (szczególnie jeśli do tego dobra się przyczyniamy) i chcemy oglądać ich szczęśliwych, a nie cierpiących. Jak twierdzi de Grouchy, z natury dążymy do dobra innych, a nie do ich cierpienia. Myślicielka podkreśla rolę wyobraźni i refleksji, rozróżniając dobro czynione przypadkowo od będącego wynikiem namysłu. Artykuł ma na celu zrekonstruowanie sposobu, w jaki de Grouchy wywodzi podstawy moralności z sympatii opartej na odczuwaniu i dostrzeganiu bólu fizycznego i przyjemności. Przedstawienie tej nieznanej szerzej polskiemu czytelnikowi teorii pozwala również na rozważenie, czy argumentacja zastosowana przez autorkę Listów o sympatii jest spójna z jej rozważaniami i wystarczająco uzasadniona.

The article presents the ways of defining and understanding hope in Polish, English and American literature. The basic theses are: 1) hope is an ambivalent phenomenon, 2) hope is connected with the work of consciousness and imagination, 3) hope conjures up visions of the alternative existential and social solutions, 4) hope is a passion and a way of knowing, 5) hope constitutes the keystone of artistic and academic activity.

The research material in this article is V. Nabokov’s short story A Nursery Tale (1926), which, by virtue of the literary genre signalled in the title, disposes us to consider the author’s communicative intention. The methodological inspiration for the research is M. Bakhtin’s genological reflection and his concept of the genre as “a representative of creative memory in the process of literature development”; W. Propp’s study and J. Derrida’s idea about fairy tales has also proved helpful. Analysis and interpretation of the short story A Fairy Tale has allowed one to distinguish particular elements and devices aimed at the short story genre transformation with special regard to the titular (fairy-tale) form of expression. The special status of the work’s protagonist is demonstrated, his creative activity understood as a kind of game, whose creator and actor is the protagonist himself, while the realisation of his erotic desire is treated as a way of regarding Femininity and of opening to “the other”, precisely connected in Nabokov’s short story with the female figure. On the parabolic/fabulous level the hero’s dream (collecting “a harem of women”) is interpreted as a literary device – an expression of romantic irony revealing the opposing forces governing human existence, a conflict between everyday reality and the world of creative fantasy/imagination. In consequence, Nabokov’s A Nursery Tale is read as an example of a narrative parabolic fairy tale.

In recent years, the rate of urban growth has increased rapidly especially in Egypt, due to the increase in population growth. The Egyptian government has set up new cities and established large factories, roads and bridges in new places to solve this trouble. This paper investigates the change monitoring of land surface temperature, urban and agricultural area in Egypt especially Kafr EL-Sheikh city as case study using high resolution satellite images. Nowadays, satellite images are playing an important role in detecting the change of urban growth. In this paper, cadastral map for Kafr El-Sheikh city with scale 1:5000, images from Landsat 7 with accuracy 30 meters; images from Google Earth with accuracy 0.5 meter; and images from SAS Planet with accuracy 0.5 m are used where all images are available during the study period (for year’s 2003, 2006, 2009, 2012, 2015 and 2017). The analysis has been performed in a platform of Geographical Information System (GIS) configured with Remote Sensing system using ArcGIS 10.3 and ERDAS Imagine image processing software. From the processing and analysis of the specified images during the studied time period, it is found that the building area was increased by 28.8% from year 2003 up to 2017 from Google Earth images and increased by percentage 34.4% from year 2003 up to year 2017 from supervised Landsat 7 images but for unsupervised Landsat 7 images, the building area was increased by percentage 35.9%. In this study, land surface temperature (LST) was measured also from satellite images for different years through 2003 until 2017. It is deduced that the increase in the building area (urban growth) in the specified city led to increase the land surface temperature (LST) which will affect some agricultural crops. Depending on the results of images analysis, Forecasting models using different algorithms for the urban and agricultural area was built. Finally, it is deduced that integration of spacebased remote sensing technology with GIS tools provide better platform to perform such activities.

For a migrant, returning to his or her homeland after living abroad can be much anticipated, yet also daunting, especially if return includes other family members who may have little insight into the cultural traditions and life approaches of the homeland. Drawing on both qualitative and quantitative evidence from interviews and a survey of both Latvian nationals living abroad and returnees to Latvia, the anxieties concerning first-generation family return with (mostly) second-generation children are unravelled – particularly the challenges faced by the children. The paper explores the difference between an imagined family return to the homeland and the lived experience. Anxieties especially concern children’s readiness for school – lack of home-country language skills, curriculum disparities and the often unsympathetic attitude of teaching staff towards returnee pupils. Preparation in advance, a resilient mindset and an avoidance of comparisons with the host country are found to reduce return anxiety for both parents and children and to ease (re)integration into the homeland setting. Home-country government initiatives offering support measures to returnees also help to mitigate the challenges of return.

This article analyzes the key characteristics of Olga Tokarczuk's fiction, whose structure appears to embody the epistemological metaphor of a network of fungal threads (mycelium). The article attempts to demonstrate that throughout her fictional world this non-binary principle integrates the whole and the fragment, identity politics and the politics of becoming, life and death, the personal and the impersonal, words and actions. The roots of the approach must be sought in the posthuman(ist) imagination, the influence of which in Tokarczuk's writing can be traced back to the 1990s, rather than her indebtedness to the aesthetic theories of postmodernism.

Whereas Wincenty Pol’s topographical verse has usually been viewed as an expression of a ‘sentimental geography’, this article proposes a new reading of a well-known poem A Song about Our Land by Wincenty Pol in terms of ‘imagined geography’, a key term of an approach inspired by geopoetics and postcolonial studies. ‘Imagined geography’ refers to a poetic map, i.e. travelogue laced with motifs from the repository of national heritage. Its images, reshaped by the writer’s imagination, form an ideologically charged whole in which an emotive sense of place or scenery (‘touching the heart’) uncovers a complex cultural stratigraphy of the ‘imagined geography’. In the light of this approach, based on the insights of geopoetics, Wincenty Pol’s poem can be treated as textual representation of a map of the real and the symbolic territory of Poland.

This essay is a new reading of Jan Barszczewski's collection of stories Szlachcic Zawalnia czyli Białoruś w fantastycznych opowiadaniach [Nobleman Zawalnia, or Belarus in Fantastic Stories of the Imagination] in the context of the 19th-century reception of the Arabian Nights and, more importantly, as an example of a genre which combines the oral and the literary traditions to express the identity-fostering experience of living at a time of upheaval and epochal change. This approach has little interest in revisiting the connections between Barszczewski's tales and Belorussian folklore. Instead, it places his stories in their direct historical context, i.e. a series of famines in Belarus the first decades of the 19th century, and the significance of 1816, the year in which the action of the stories is set. It is no coincidence that it was also the Year without a Summer, a catastrophic global climate anomaly, which made a great impact on the Romantic imagination.

This article deals with the expansion of the culture of quixotry in Polish fiction of the 2010s. Although Tomasz Wiśniewski, Natalka Suszczyńska, Dorota Kotas and Wit Szostak, notable representatives of this new trend, on the whole make no reference to Don Quixote, their novels do display certain characteristic features of the quixotic discourse, i.e. the story is centred on a character with an unconventional perception of reality and the primacy of imagination in relations between the individual and society. The imagination that drives these novels moves both upwards, opening to the characters a prospect of vertical ‘Gothic’ ascent, and sideways, helping the characters to explore various ways of life and to adapt in the horizontal real world (cf. Dawid Kujawa, ‘Dzieci skitrane na tyłach katedry’ [Children hidden at the back of the cathedral], “Stoner Polski”, 2022). In the texts of younger writers the vertical vector is often associated with the desire to transcend the condition of depressive precarity and the logic of the capitalist system).