Theories

Not Just for the Archive. On the Literary Event and Documentary Film

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). (...)

Poetics in Action. Time and Code in the Poetry of John Cayley and the Poets of Rozdzielczość Chleba

Appeals for an expanded poetics, heard in the past decade in discussions of contemporary textuality, always promising a renaissance for poetics and its preoccupations, are quick to find a sympathetic response. Who among literary scholars, a privileged crew in the 20th century due to the position of language and textual problems at the centre of cultural studies, would not wish to hold onto that strong hand in the 21st, after the performative[1] and digital “turns”? (...)

Toward a Poetics of Video Games

The poetics of contemporary texts devoted to poetics – if one may use such a description – stipulate that in the first paragraphs, the author should report on the current situation of the discipline. Such regular self-referentiality (typical as well for other disciplines subject to permanent suspicions of crisis, of which contemporary comparative literature may serve as a good example[1]) should not be particularly surprising to anyone. (...)

The Literariness on the Net, and the Functioning of Literariness Online. Perspectives for Research

Methodological or terminological troubles absorb a sizable part of the attention of literary scholars entangled in studying new forms of internet communication. The word “entangled” here means that literary scholarship, although it has never been impartial, is finally losing, in digital space, its status as objective knowledge [knowledge of an object], becoming a cultural practice. (...)

Invented Genres – An Overlooked Problem in Genre Theory?

A poetics of the moment would appear to postulate the end of, or at least a limit to, the problems traditionally assigned to genre theory. After all, a literary genre enables us to find constants among literary elements, to look for invariants amid literary variability: common, constant, and intersubjective traits – a kind of model, representing the idealization of the real, the momentary, of a given literary work. (...)

The Poetics of Indefinition

“The present work is the fruit of reflection on Polish verse of the last half century” – with these words, in 1999, Artur Grabowski began his great book Wiersz: forma i sens (Poem: Form and Sense), in which he offered an intriguing elaboration of his concept of momentaneous systems in the history of Polish poetry. (...)