Między sentymentem a sceptycyzmem. Jana Józefa Szczepańskiego doświadczenie Wschodu (na podstawie książki Do raju i z powrotem)

The purpose of this article is to present the reflections and remarks of the writer Jan Józef Szczepański contained in his book Do raju i z powrotem [To Paradise and Back], which resulted from his 1961 trip to the Middle East and the western India. Szczepański, an author, screenwriter and Indianist by education (he graduated in Oriental studies from Jagiellonian University), confronts his ideas about the Orient with the reality he observes on the spot. He focuses on the signs of modernization in Arab countries on the one hand, and Islamic orthodoxy and religious fundamentalism on the other. This becomes an opportunity to compare the sources of civilizational and cultural differences between secularized Europe and the still religious East.Celem artykułu jest przedstawienie zawartych w książce Do raju i z powrotem refleksji i uwag autora, Jana Józefa Szczepańskiego, będących efektem jego podróży w 1961 r. na Bliski Wschód i do zachodnich Indii. Szczepański, pisarz, scenarzysta, a z wykształcenia indianista (ukończył orientalistykę na Uniwersytecie Jagiellońskim), konfrontuje swoje wyobrażenia o Oriencie z realiami, jakie obserwuje na miejscu. Swoją uwagą obejmuje przejawy modernizacji krajów arabskich z jednej strony, z drugiej zaś – islamskiej ortodoksji i fundamentalizmu religijnego. Staje się to okazją do porównań dotyczących źródeł różnic cywilizacyjnych i kulturowych między zlaicyzowaną Europą a nadal religijnym Wschodem

Pisarz i historia : o twórczości Jana Józefa Szczepańskiego

The work offers a presentation of three important problems present in the literary output of Jan Józef Szczepański, which make him the writer of the 1920s generation, the writer of the intelligentsia, and the writer expressing his ideas on the tasks of art and artist. The image of the generation present in Szczepański’s works confirms the theoretical remarks about this sociological and literary phenomenon. What can be observed are the clearly stressed common experiences of the generation, the consciousness of the group belonging and its differences from other generations as well as the exceptional character of their fates. The initial mytholigization of the generation consisting in its entanglement in the “silent action” gives way to the creation of the generational legend resulting, to a large extent, from the policy of the People’s Poland: degradation of the merits of the part of the generation who fought in the anti-communist underground army in World War II, repression’s or removal from the literary scene of a numerous group of people. Another factor is the imperfection of human memory which, after some time, “forgets” or gives up to some versions of historical of collective memory. Such comments can be found in the short story Glow Behind the Forest (Łuna za lasem) and in the essay In the Service of the Great Charterer (W służbie Wielkiego Armatora). The intelligentsia aspects of the work of Jan Józef Szczepański discussed in Chapter II concentrate on four main problems: 1. the creation of the protagonist, for whom, in most of his works, the consciousness of belonging to the intelligentsia as a group of people coming from a particular tradition and representing a given ethos was decisive as regards the selection of attitude and the determination of one’s own position in the face of reality, 2. reflection of the pre-war intelligentsia ethos heritage against the historical and political changes which affected the Polish society between September 1939 and the events following 1989,3. the positive evaluation of traditional, i.e. pre-war, ethos of the intelligentsia, 4. the expression of the aims and aspirations of the traditional Polish intelligentsia in the years of the People’s Poland. The paradigm of the intelligentsia character is determined by a few elements. Among them is the stress put by the protagonists on the peculiar social status and the accentuation of the relations with the traditional ethos of the member of the Polish intelligentsia. It can be observed that in the subsequent works these relations is are marked more and more clearly by Szczepański, which finds it exponent in the growing consciousness of the roots and world of values which the protagonist follows in his life. Generally, the writer creates protagonists faithful to the ethos of the intelligentsia. The characteristic feature of their attitude is the perception of the conflict between the believed - in hierarchy of values and the norms of conduct, and the threats caused by the circumstances destructive of the given order of the world: by the war waged on a total scale, material and social degradation, the system of totalitarian power, the enticements of power. The author presents the life of a member of the Polish intelligentsia both before and during the war along with the ethical choices accompanying that life. The evaluation of the intelligentsia tradition has become the next question undertaken by the writer. A distinguishing feature of Szczepański’s work is the acceptance of that tradition, and in his recently published works, especially in the short story A Day Passes (Mija Dzień) an obvious mythologization of the heritage of the II Polish Republic is discernible as the formula of the escapist attitude. In the works devoted to the reflection on the essence of art and artist the constant presence of a few questions and the steadiness in the presentation of ideas must be underlined. The author of The Reef (Rafa) presents the conception of art and artist referring to the classical definition in which, next to the immanent aesthetic values, the ethical issues turn out to be equally relevant - art, though ontologically independent, always carries a message, an idea based on axiological assumptions. The writer frequently underlines his own idea on the mutual relations of the artist and the work and assumes the artist’s attitude to be the basic criterion of the evaluation of art, positively valorising the independence of his actions, the sincerity of expression, and the attempts to transgress the borders of the common human experience which he calls the desire of transcendence. He predicts that there are two ways of creative realisation: the first one consist in giving testimony to reality - here the ethical aspect of art is dominating, the other one is the artistic creativity and ludism. The first one is fathered by Conrad as the creator of the concept of literature positing demanding tasks, predominantly ethical, for the writer. In this sense his program is similar to Norwid’s idea of the mutual dependence of word and act in the life of an artist. Norwid is another, on top of Conrad, patron of Szczepańskie creative duties. What dominates in the reflections of the author of The Reef over the essence of art is the stress put on art’s relation transcendence, that is to say the attempts at transgressing the borders available to human experience. The writer expresses his conviction that this the feature of free art, the art which is independent from external influences: ideology, fashion, public demand, the market mechanisms which treat works of art as consumer goods or capital investment. The presentation of the threats for an artist in the contemporary world becomes one of the main points of the literary program of the author of The Cadence (Kadencja). The writer sees creativity as the basic domain of life of both and individual and the society. Szczepanski’s attitude to the role of the writer and literature in social life is particularly interesting, for he endows them with an enormous power of affecting the memory and of shaping consciousness, not only aesthetical, but first of all of cultural, civilizational, and moral consciousness. In the literature which gives testimony to its time there are the possibilities which are incomparably greater than the possibilities of scholarly treatises or the short-lived political actions. The author of numerous works undertaking the authotelic problematic delimits in this way the positive program of creativity based on the power of the word. He frequently made use of this privilege, concentrating in his works on the problems which were strongly connected with the social life and the experiences of the man living in the second half of the 20th century

Dom jako sens (w zapisach Jana Józefa Szczepańskiego)

The article is devoted to the analysis of literary texts and diary entries of J.J. Szczepański, in the context of the broadly understood problem of home. The writer presents home (in various moments of his life) as an archetypal place of rooting, as an asylum, a haven — a place of departures and returns. The author of the article recalls data concerning autobiographical character of Szczepański’s writing, and she draws the readers’ attention to the fact that his observations correspond to the fundamental theses of the oikological reflection

Obrazy świata : wizualne reprezentacje rzeczywistości w polskiej prozie współczesnej

Przedmiotem badań zamieszczonych w książce uczyniono literaturę, której twórcy ujawniają własną wrażliwość odbioru rzeczywistości, dokonując jej wizualnego przedstawienia, a zarazem odwołują się do dyspozycji współczesnego odbiorcy, także umiejącego czytać teksty obrazowe. Wykazano, że wizualne reprezentacje stają się instrumentem nawiązania porozumienia pisarza z czytelnikiem dzięki wyznaczeniu pola wspólnego doświadczenia, jakim jest obcowanie w określonej ikonosferze, oraz że pozwalają autorowi podjąć, a następnie poprowadzić istotne dla niego tematy, jakimi są: przeżycie historii i doświadczenie przestrzeni oraz wydobywane z nich sensy egzystencjalne. Zaproponowano zbliżenia analityczne konkretnych utworów (Zagłada Piotra Szewca, Finis Silesiae Henryka Wańka, Zimno Piotra Czakańskiego, Dziennik okrętowy, Dukla, Jadąc do Babadag, Fado, Dojczland, Dziennik podany później Andrzeja Stasiuka), w których problem wizualnych reprezentacji rzeczywistości istnieje samoistnie. Wybór literackiego materiału posłużył ponadto zaprezentowaniu różnorodności poszczególnych artystycznych ujęć. W analizach wykorzystano nie tylko narzędzia literaturoznawczych badań, lecz także narzędzia i kategorie medioznawcze, teorie estetyczne, historiograficzne i socjologiczne, w przekonaniu że pozwalają za każdym razem celnie wyodrębnić, opisać i umieścić w wyjaśniającym kontekście fenomen wizualnej reprezentacji

Opowieść rodzinna jako horyzont tożsamości człowieka : na przykładzie "Szuflady" Katarzyny Szczepańskiej-Kowalczuk

The purpose of the article is to present, on the example of Katarzyna Szczepańska- Kowalczuk’s book, the identity that is shaped during the preparation and narrative elaboration on a family history. The result of these activities is the literary form of the modern non-fiction saga, created by women on the basis of family documents. The family history appears to be not ready, being in the process of ordering, also reveals the person who makes the selection, choice, reconstruction, who narrates. Understood after Paul Ricoeur, the narrative identity of the authors (“to answer the question ‘who?’ Is to tell the story of life”) in the case of family stories is constituted at the interface between the identity of the experiencing subject (ipse) and an entity identical with another (idem) — a result is a kind of autobiography: “The subject also appears as a reader and author of his own life”. The second aspect of considering the identities of the authors who create contemporary non-fiction family saga is the proposal of Charles Taylor, who justifies the need to build identity by placing the subject in relation to the moral horizon shaped in a dialogue with authorities, in the “horizon of significant others”

O tożsamości

„Tożsamość” stała się obecnie słowem niebywale atrakcyjnym. Przypisują sobie ją właściwie wszyscy; zarówno indywidualnie, jak i zbiorowo. Współcześnie nie wypada nie określić swojej tożsamości, choćby miała to być, jak lansuje się wielu w mass mediach, tożsamość… celebryty. A ostatnio, co wszyscy zauważamy, wpływ na „konieczność” obrania tożsamości mają, atakujące opinię publiczną i funkcjonujące w niej w ogromnym uproszczeniu, „idee”, które odwołują się do worka pojęciowego, jakim stało się gender („płeć kulturowa”), czy też medialnie nagłaśniane przykłady tak zwanych coming out („wyjścia z ukrycia”, „obwieszczenia”), pozostającej od wieków w naszej kulturze w sferze prywatnej i intymnej, orientacji seksualnej. Ale też obserwujemy wzrost promocji tożsamości lokalnych, organizujących samoświadomość większej lub mniejszej zbiorowości oraz wydobywających jej specyfikę. Możemy podać przykłady takich działań w odniesieniu do grup etnicznych (jak Kaszubi czy Ślązacy), regionów (z którymi zapoznają nas reklamy telewizyjne i billboardowe), miast (kto nie zna Sandomierza z telewizyjnego serialu Ojciec Mateusz?). […

Jan Józef Szczepański’s Questions about the Meaning of Faith. Based on Dziennik (Journal)

The starting point for the author of the article is to recognize Jan Józef Szczepański’s Dziennik as a testimony of self-nurturing and self-education. The journal records show the processual quality of “designing” life by the author. The purpose of the article is to characterize the drama of inability to believe presented in the journal in the perspective of the philosophy of faith. The analysis of the writer’s attitude leads to the conclusion that his objection to temporality and nothingness is a confirmation of the meaning of faith, despite the inability to decide which Søren Kierkegaard called the “leap to faith”. The article also contains a reconstruction of Szczepański’s views on writing as the opposition to passing, which is his individual path to add meaning to his own life

Skąd ta książka?

Wstęp do książki "Kulturowe gry w Grze o tron", po redakcją Beaty Gontarz

Nikifor Zbigniewa Herberta i Jana Józefa Szczepańskiego

Zbigniew Herbert and Jan Józef Szczepański showed interest in art and were friends with outstanding artists. Both of them learned to paint in their youth. In their texts, they revealed the competence of the experts. The author of the article analyses the literary works and journalistic texts of the two writers, resulting from their meeting with Nikifor and the experience of his works. She shows that the two writers, despite an imposed ideological context, negative for them and for the work of the painter (the decree of socialist realism in art) found their own key to Nikifor’s work: Herbert embedded it in myth, Szczepański in metaphysics

Modele "ja" bohatera powieści Sławomira Shutego "Zwał" : rozkład tożsamościowej jedności osoby

In her analysis of Sławomir Shuty’s novel Zwał Beata Gontarz concentrated her attention on the collapse of the subjective unity of the main character, who represents all contemporary young people. First person narration in the form of a diary, its autobiographic character and situating a character in the middle of the described reality all draw the readers’ attention to the problematic “I” and encourage them to take a „more anthropologic” look at the visible in the novel traces of contemporary disintegration of the subject. The entanglement of the subject’s “I” into incompatible situations was illustrated in Zwał with three different models of subjectivity: the schizophrenic “I”, the deprived “I” and the estheticized “I”. All the epithets describing “I” were treated descriptively. Finally, the author of the article referred to the observations on the postmodern condition of the individual made by Fredric Jameson, Agata Bielik-Robson and Wolfgang Welsch