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. (...)
Only bad writers find constant pleasure in writing; truly great authors have at least occasional fits of creative self-doubt.
On the other hand, it is well known that about two out of every thousand people enjoy reading poetry – not counting poets themselves. (...)
We publish Polish translation of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s How to Approach Poetry as a Mode of Attention? (The Arts of Attention, ed. Katalin Kállay, Amsterdam 2015 [in print]). (...)
What are we to do with these spring days that are now fast coming on? Early this morning the sky was gray, but if you go to the window now you are surprised and lean your cheek against the latch of the casement.
The sun is already setting, but down below you see it lighting up the face of the little girl who strolls along looking about her, and at the same time you see her eclipsed by the shadow of the man behind overtaking her. (...)
– (Stimmung) – an aesthetic quality not yet defined within the context of poetics, emerging in the process of a cultural text’s reception, formed as a result of objective and subjective factors in that process.
The term Stimmung developed in German aesthetics and was closely connected with the concept of harmony, understood as an epistemological category. (...)
There are at least two benefits that come from looking through the archive of Polish literary scholars’ contributions to literary theory. The first is reading “founding” texts which, through their influence, reception, and the inspiration they have thereby generated, come together as links in the chain forming the main line of development of Polish literary theory. (...)
Zofia Król, Powrót do świata. Dzieje uwagi w filozofii i literaturze w XX wieku (Return to the World. A History of Attention in Twentieth Century Philosophy and Literature), Warszawa 2013
The unhappy diagnosis of the human condition experienced in the space of history and various philosophies through numerous losses, disruptions, disenchantments and alienations, whether drawn (as in Zofia Król’s work) from the writings of George Steiner (the broken contract between word and thing) or from that of Michel Foucault (the “divorce” of words and things), can bring about and provoke diverse strategies of dealing with the world without foundations or the possibility of self-expression. (...)
