Contemporary polemics about the autonomy and function of literature are concentrated, speaking in the broadest terms and therefore naturally oversimplifying, between two positions that differ in their definition primarily of literature’s status and role. (...)
The Small, the Silesian, and the Black
These three adjectives are a kind of paraphrase of the memorable triad The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. I mention the title of Ennio Morricone’s hit soundtrack (from the Sergio Leone film) as a musical emblem of the “spaghetti western,” an Italian imitation of American cinema’s crowning genre, once regarded with indignation and later acknowledged as anticipating the anti-Western and the deconstruction of the classic form. (...)
Microscopy: the Experience of Seeing
It’s like a set of split rings. You can fit any one of them into any other. Each ring or each plateau ought to have its own climate, its own tone or timbre.
Gilles Deleuze on the composition of A Thousand Plateaus[1]
I would like to begin my essay by mentioning a book for young people written over 60 years ago by the once highly esteemed popularizer of science Tadeusz Unkiewicz, the first editor of the journal Problemy. (...)
The greatest terror of Danny’s life was DIVORCE, a word that always appeared in his mind as a sign painted in red letters which were covered with hissing, poisonous snakes. … The most terrifying thing about DIVORCE was that he had sensed the word—or concept, or whatever it was that came to him in his understandings—floating around in his own parents’ heads, sometimes diffuse and relatively distant, sometimes as thick and obscuring and frightening as thunderheads. (...)
In Lieu of an Introduction
Virginia Woolf has a resonant, often-quoted sentence in her famous essay on George Eliot from 20 November 1919, asserting that Middlemarch, for all of its flaws, was “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.”[1] In a less frequently quoted passage grappling with the previously mentioned flaws, the most important British high-modernist author writes:
It is partly that her hold upon dialogue, when it is not dialect, is slack; and partly that she seems to shrink with an elderly dread of fatigue from the effort of emotional concentration. (...)
A funny thing happened when I was flipping through my PDF of Genette’s Paratexts. I was scrolling through the “pages” when suddenly, around page 160, the PDF stopped displaying text. The next three hundred pages were blank. (...)
Practices of addition? Perhaps better the reverse: practices of subtraction? What happens when Różewicz adds on? Does that addition add a sum susceptible to calculation, or does it rather engender differences? And how do those differences work? (...)
It is a truism to state that film culture, from the very earliest stages of its development, intersected with literary culture on many levels. The latter often functioned as an educator in this scheme (suggesting, among other things, storytelling conventions, narrative strategies, and dramaturgic devices), or supplied history (a gigantic realm of adaptation issues), but also worked as a mirror in many areas exceeding the bounds of the work of art itself (one example among many could be reflection on the audience for literature and film). (...)
A literary text seems in contemporary culture to be endlessly mediated by new media, as well as popular literature and pop culture. These spaces change the tone of relations between a text and its environment, creating a new perspective on the question of what constitutes an addition to the text and what function it performs. (...)
