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. (...)
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”? (...)
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. (...)
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. (...)
This kind of poetics would seem very much like a book of trigonometry to a child who just wants to draw pictures.
F. Schlegel
According to Friedrich Schlegel, the creation of a “poetical poetics” (eine poetische Poetik) was one of “the most important desiderata of philosophy” (F 165). (...)
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 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. (...)
One reason for a change in the meaning of a literary term can be the reassessment of whether its current definition corresponds to the reality it refers to. This can be spurred on by new or newly interpreted literary trends, seasonal reconsiderations of artistic devices, the discovery of previously unseen configurations of elements in a work, and so on.
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