Teorie

On the Silesian Micrological School (1999-2005). A Sprinkling of Reminiscences

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. (...)

“To look darkness. To subside”: From Micropoetics to Micropolitics and Back Again (On Method)

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. (...)

Writing Without Words: Blok’s Contextual Poetics

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. (...)

George Eliot, George Henry Lewes and the Mechanisms of Literary Influence

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. (...)

Pisanie bez słów: poetyka kontekstów Błoka

Timothy Williams

a b s t r a k t

Rozwód napełniał Danny’ego największym strachem, zawsze pojawiał się w jego myślach jako znak wymalowany czerwonymi literami, zakrytymi przez syczące jadowite węże […]. Najokropniejsze było to, że wyczuwał, jak rozwód – słowo, pojęcie czy też coś, co mu się objawiało w momentach zrozumienia – chodzi po głowach własnym rodzicom, czasem mgliste i dość odległe, kiedy indziej gęste, ciemne i przerażające niczym deszczowa chmura. (...)