We would like to take the title of our journal in the anniversary issue not figuratively, but almost literally. The study of fragments of all kinds – interrupted or incomplete not only because of the passage of years, but also encrypted, coded or deliberately distorted – is a significant part of the work of the literary scholar (especially, but not only, the textologist). Records such as mottoes or dedications (testimonies of the purpose of a text or attempts to direct its reception), as well as glosses or commentaries (testimonies of reading and reception), provide a wealth of information for analysing the relationship between the work, its creator and its audience. Inscriptions (in the form of captions, dedications, epigraphs, etc.) are also invaluable material for the cultural studies scholar, archaeologist, historian, sociologist. The medium on which these literary testimonies appear does not have to be paper – it can be a wall, a pavement, a gravestone, a coffin board, etc. In contemporary everyday life, they take the form of wall graffiti, advertising banners (often with critical or witty comments from anonymous recipients) or street banners. Reference to a common, extra-textual cultural code, the variety of functions performed, brevity, fragmentation – these are the characteristics of intriguing testimonies of literary and social communication.

Interdisciplinarity is now an approach to research and popularisation that is as much in demand as it is forced by the new way of perceiving scientific and cultural texts available online (combining different media: text, graphics, sound, video, animation). We would like to look at both the forms of these texts themselves, which require analysis using tools specific to different fields (e.g. opera and musical librettos, sung poetry, graphic novels), as well as the scientific discourse, which nowadays often combines different methodologies and creates new disciplines, not only within the traditionally understood humanities itself (e.g. the use of the achievements of the social sciences: sociology of literature, postcolonialism, gender studies, law studies, but also natural sciences or even exact sciences: animal studies, geopoetics, neurolinguistics, statistical analysis of texts). Such marriages can be extremely fruitful and appropriate for the times of the next technical revolution bringing new perspectives (see discussions around artificial intelligence), but they can also result in the blurring of boundaries between different scientific disciplines, the creation of false analogies between studied phenomena and the trivialisation of a discourse focused on the form and accessibility of the message, or even a dangerous blurring of the term ”humanities”, covering all fields of human activity.

This issue would be devoted not only to literary records and paraliterary documents concerning war experiences, but also to internal conflicts in societies (such as, for example, the strong socio-political conflict in our country in recent times), would address the subject of man as an internally conflicted being (“Fragile, unseeing, split in the self…” – perhaps it is worth recalling this diagnosis by Mikołaj Sęp Szarzyński in times of the still dominating anthropocentrism?) and would include reflections on the philosophy of conflict as such (from Heraclitus to Hegel, Marx, Freud and Karl Schmitt, but also in the light of religious thought: from St Augustine to the “philosophy of dialogue” of Emmanuel Levinas, Martin Buber or Father Joseph Tischner). The authors – as intended by the editors–- would undertake their reflection on the material of all literary and paraliterary documents, or those recorded in audiovisual form (so-called “testimonies of memory”).

Every text is essentially a palimpsest, and no work of art could be created without the great number of those that precede it. However, the attitude towards this truth has changed quite radically in the history of art. Even if one considers that postmodernism has already lost its position as the dominant cultural trend, there is no doubt that the phenomenon of the “saturation” of culture with various texts referring to each other – a the “symbiosis” (or “parasitism”) of texts – still exists and even is becoming more and more common. References, intertextuality, cryptic quotations, playing with the original (the so-called fanfics – from fan fiction – created by recipients on blogs and Internet forums of stories from a given universe of novels, films or games) or new interpretations constantly appear in the field of the written word as well as its translation into other media (e.g. the phenomenon of so-called retelling in film adaptations). We would also like to emphasize that in “remakes” we can clearly observe the remodelling of value systems and aesthetic codes that have been in force over the centuries (the problem of commercialization of art, abuse or plagiarism).