Inside out

Zbigniew Białas, Paweł Jędrzejko and Karolina Lebek

Bielsko-Biała, 2012,

ISBN 978-83-928226-3-9

Inter, intra, intro … pragmatically speaking, the contexts of their usage define their commonsensical understanding. Yet as markers of a rather powerful spatial metaphor, these unassuming prefixes, sharing a common etymology, provide the raison d’être for the present book. Denoting liminality, such seemingly innocent morphemes have the power of collapsing binary oppositions upon which Western metanarratives so heavily depend. If brought to the forefront of critical attention, they are likely to invoke thinking in terms of relational epistemologies operating within a language conducive to a nonuniversalist description of how we live and, consequently, who we are.
It is specifically the worldmaking power of the discourses of interiority that has inspired seventeen authors representing a wide range of professional preferences and preferred methodologies to meditate upon the "inside narratives" of contemporary Western culture. Beginning with theoretical reflections and finishing with literary, historical and psychological studies dedicated to individual authors, texts, or phenomena, the book explores the inter-esse of the human condition: the principles of the elementary mode of our being in the world.