The Naked Mountaineer in the Mirror of Myth

The author puts forward the thesis that nowadays in Polish mountaineering literature (auto)biographical forms replace the older genre of expedition books. This change is the effect of the search for fully revealed “real,” and somehow “naked” man as the main source of contemporary’s cultural discourses, which was diagnosed by Michel Foucault as the “anthropological sleep.” The article is an attempt to analyse the mountaineering discourse as the set of transformations of myth (in accordance with Claude Lévi-Strauss’s understanding).

Not Much Has Been Written about the Mountains… On the Subject of Mountain Studies

The article discusses the research subject of mountain studies. The standpoints of two scholars, representative for Polish literary studies, are distinguished, that of Jacek Kolbuszewski’s and Tomasz Stępień’s. While Kolbuszewski argues that the term “mountain literature,” however popular, is imprecise and it is more justified to speak of a theme or a motif of mountains in literature, Stępień draws upon the developments in media studies and adopts a broader definition encompassing all literature somehow related to mountains. Both researchers are united in their conviction that mountaineering literature (the works written by climbers) is a separate phenomenon in literature.