summer 2015

Poetics Through the Prism of Cultural Studies

Tomasz Kunz

a b s t r a c t

Reading it today, there’s something quaint about the prediction made by eminent scholar and theoretist of literature Michał Głowiński, in a text written in the 1980s, that the dichotomy between internal and external methodologies inherited from the reaction against Positivism would eventually be abandoned, yielding to the advent of a new era in literary studies, thanks to the application of an integral method based on a communicative conception of the work of literature. (...)

New Situations of Poetics

Tomasz Mizerkiewicz

a b s t r a c t

Poetics has often been described in recent times as a field forced into making defensive gestures. There have also been assertions that the charges mounted by post-structuralism of a tendency to search for eidetic literariness, the need to generalize from what is consummately idiomatic, the shuttering of literature inside a closed system, and so on, are still valid. (...)

"Where Did I Wake Up". Stanisław Barańczak’s Morning in an Apartment Block

Joanna Grądziel-Wójcik

Stanisław Barańczak, “Where Did I Wake Up” (transl. Clara Cavanagh)

Where did I wake up? where am I? Where’s
my right side, where’s the left? where’s above, and
where’s below? Take it easy, that’s my body
on its back, that’s the hand I use
to hold my fork, there’s the one I use
to seize my knife or extend in greeting;
beneath me are the sheet, mattress, and floor,
above me are the quilt and ceiling; on my
left the wall, the hall, the door, the milk bottle
that stands outside the door, since on my right I see
a window, and beyond that, dawn; under me
a gulf of floors, the basement, in it jars of jam
hermetically sealed for the winter;
above me other floors, the attic, laundry
hung on strings, a roof, TV
antennae; further to the left, a street
leads to the western suburbs, beyond them
fields, roads, borders, rivers, ocean
tides; on the right, already bathed in gray splotches
of dawn, other streets, fields, highways, rivers,
borders, frozen steppes and icy forests;
below me, foundations, earth, the fiery abyss,
above me clouds, the wind, a faint moon,
fading stars, yes;
relieved,
he shuts his eyes again, his head at rest
where the perpendiculars and planes all meet,
pinned to every cross at once
by the steady nails of his pounding heart. (...)

Ars Poetica

Ewa Kraskowska, Agnieszka Kwiatkowska, Joanna Grądziel-Wójcik

a b s t r a c t

– in Latin, the art of poetry. Using the criteria of genre and theme, it can be used to define at least three types of literary and metaliterary texts that form a clearly defined continuum from antiquity to the present day in the cultural universe of the West: 1) classical normative and descriptive poetics, codifying the rules governing literary creation in various genres; 2) a specific type of self-reflexive modernist lyric poem devoted to expounding diverse views on the essence of art, often–but not necessarily–entitled “Ars poetica”; 3) self-instruction manuals and guidebooks for creative writing, intended for amateur authors, as well as essays devoted to the secrets of the writer’s craft. (...)

Letter

Lucyna Marzec

A survey of theoretical statements concerning the letter in twentieth-century Polish literature studies discourse can help us bring into relief all of the elements of the transmutations in theory whose continuation (but not culmination) is the so-called cultural turn and a variety of interpretative practices that together form the panorama twenty-first century literature studies. (...)

Void

Małgorzata Cieliczko

a b s t r a c t

1. Emptiness in Science and Art – Philosophical Prolegomenon

The concept of emptiness, or the void, is used in various disciplines: from the natural and social sciences (including psychology) to the fields of theology and philosophy;1)The anthologies of articles written from widely differing perspectives by various scholars on the problem of the void testify to the multidisciplinary nature of this category: see Wszechświat, bezład, pustka (Universe, Chaos, Void), ed. (...)

On Franciszek Ksawery Dmochowski’s "The Art of Rhyming"

Agnieszka Kwiatkowska

a b s t r a c t

Franciszek Ksawery Dmochowski’s The Art of Rhyming was published in 1788 by the Warsaw Piarists.1)In Drukarnia J.K. Mci i Rzeczypospolitej and Księża Scholarum Piarum. Already in the same year, a second edition was prepared, whose popularity would continue unabated until the early nineteenth century. (...)