Silesian Studies in English
International Conference of English and American Studies
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Keynote Lecture
Tony Kushner’s political theatre and Hitler, Reagan, Trump, and Slovakia
The lecture will trace the development of the relevance of Tony Kushner’s A Bright Room Called Day as a piece of political theatre on the backdrop of its Brechtian character and topicality. It will discuss how different productions kept updating the play’s appeal in the forty years of its existence. Following the changes in the text and staging approaches, I will show how Kushner’s politics resonated in the play’s different productions (USA, UK, France, Slovakia) and how the dramatic and engaged essence of the work responded to changing political backgrounds.
Dr. hab. Konrad Szcześniak: A VAST LEXICAL MEMORY IN L2
According to Schmidt’s (1990, 1993) Noticing Hypothesis, learning new elements (words, expressions, constructions, etc.) in a second language requires conscious attention. In order to acquire new linguistic features, learners must "notice" them: it is necessary to attend to specific aspects of language, such as vocabulary, grammar structures, or pronunciation. Mere incidental exposures to the input are not sufficient for acquisition. However, recent studies suggest that a lot more information makes it into the learner's lexical memory than is consciously registered (Szcześniak 2024). The second language lexicon is a vast and robust system capable of recording details under the threshold of conscious awareness.
