New release
The Staszic Palace as Affective Heterotopia: New Category of Spatial Description
The book proposes a new category – heterotopia of affect – which builds upon Michel Foucault’s typology. The category refers to changes of the places that accumulate contents of ideological, historical, religious, and national character. The book tells the history of a very Polish edifice as well as its surrounding cultural milieu and the history-creating role of the scientific community. The author focuses on the Staszic Palace whose fate reveals how – at different times in history – it catalyzed activities in search of radical changes in the mental landscape of the Polish community.
The book The Staszic Palace as Affective Heterotopia : New Category of Spatial Description was created as part of a project carried out at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences, which grew out of literary studies. The Polish edition was released under the title Metamorfozy Pałacu Staszica [Metamorphoses of the Staszic Palace] in 2017. The main premise here was to look at the history of the building’s transformations through the prism of textual records. However, it must be emphasised that the point was not to trace the literary reminiscences of this building but to propose a research category that defines the essence of the process of changes to which specific places are subjected.