At a moment when we have practically abandoned the practice of reading books – as the statistics on reading testify – and gloomy diagnoses are intensifying from both literary theoreticians and poets, the most important question facing literary studies turns out to be why we read at all. (...)
Classical poetics is an area rich in traditions. It has been practiced by many outstanding scholars, yet whose voices are rarely to be heard outside the bounds of classical philology, boundaries maintained by the tradition of poetics itself. (...)
Polish poetry written after 1864, once disregarded and considered to fall far short of the work of its great Romantic predecessors, has at long last received some absorbing exegeses in recent times, among which the most prominent is undoubtedly the monograph of Krakow scholar Tadeusz Budrewicz, which bears the modest and unassuming title Wierszobranie (druga połowa XIX wieku) [Selection of Verse (Late Nineteenth Century)]. (...)
In Marcin Sendecki’s book Opisy przyrody (Descriptions of Nature), published in 2002, there is a minimalistic poem called “Czynności” (Activities). The two-line poem is dedicated to “Świe” (do we dare decode this as short for Świetlicki?) and runs as follows: “Jaki świetny świat. (...)
Zofia Król, Powrót do świata. Dzieje uwagi w filozofii i literaturze w XX wieku (Return to the World. A History of Attention in Twentieth Century Philosophy and Literature), Warszawa 2013
The unhappy diagnosis of the human condition experienced in the space of history and various philosophies through numerous losses, disruptions, disenchantments and alienations, whether drawn (as in Zofia Król’s work) from the writings of George Steiner (the broken contract between word and thing) or from that of Michel Foucault (the “divorce” of words and things), can bring about and provoke diverse strategies of dealing with the world without foundations or the possibility of self-expression. (...)
Franco Moretti, The Bourgeois. Between History and Literature, London-New York 2013.
When we think of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, we have two pictures to consider – the furious activity of modern entrepreneurs using every possible means in order to multiply their property, but also the quiet life of the urban middle class, its many ethical rules, its ascetic lifestyle and moral strictness. (...)
Leonard F. Lisi, Marginal Modernity. The Aesthetics of Dependency from Kierkegaard to Joyce,
Fordham University Press, New York 2013
In Duino in 1913, as Rainer Maria Rilke was beginning work on his elegies and finishing The Notebooks of Male Laurids Brigge, he underwent a singular experience. (...)
Elżbieta Rybicka, Geopoetyka. Przestrzeń i miejsce we współczesnych teoriach i praktykach literackich
(Geopoetics. Space and Place in Contemporary Literary Theory and Practice), Universitas, Kraków 2014
Thanks to the work of Elżbieta Rybicka, use of the term “geopoetics” has been active in Polish literary scholarship for at least several years, chiefly because of the article “Geopoetics (On the City, Space and Place in Contemporary Literary Theory and Practice)” included in the book Kulturowa teoria literatury (Cultural Literary Theory). (...)
Dorota Korwin-Piotrowska, Poetyka. Przewodnik po świecie tekstów (Poetics. A Guide to the World of Texts),
Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, Kraków 2011
A discussion on the status and future of poetics as a basic area of literary studies has been going on without interruption now for many years. (...)
