Around the nation's mystic core: interactions between political concepts and the literary imagination in the works of Stanisław Brzozowski

The essay examines Stanisław Brzozowski's ideas on mutual interactions between the sphere of culture and the realm of the political. It shows how Brzozowski made use of literary texts in order to elucidate social and political processes. In doing so, he insisted on a specific form of knowledge accessible through texts of literature and literary criticism, which are not limited by the mere "logic of notions.” Following Vico and Sorel Brzozowski detected an "irrational core” at the bases of human collectivities such as above all modern nations, and it is through literature that this core can be revealed. Brzozowski's understanding of political ideas and concepts is informed—to a decisive degree—by the literary imagination. This can be shown by a semantic and rhetorical analysis of some of his later writing

Słodko-gorzkie heterotopie. Bruno Schulz i „tekst sanatoryjny” w europejskiej literaturze okresu międzywojennego

Bittersweet heterotopias: Bruno Schulz and the ‘sanatorial text’ in european interwar literature This essay puts forward an idea to read Bruno Schulz’s story „The Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass” against the background of a specifi c genre in European literature of the interwar period, namely, the ‘sanatorial text’. This term, coined here by analogy to V. Toporov’s ‘Petersburg text’, is based upon the observation that narratives set in sanatoriums share some semantic and structural features; the most important being the heterotopic character of the sanatorial world. According to M. Foucault, a ‘heterotopia’ is a place that ‘represents’, ‘contests’ and ‘inverts’ common places in a society. In M. Proust’s Recherche…, Th. Mann’s Magic Mountain, and M. Blecher’s Scarred Hearts the heteropic setting is used to produce a feeling of estrangement. These novels explore the notions of time and society by constructing a heterotopic counter-world where the ‘ordinary’ stream of events is interrupted and life becomes intensifi ed, it is made palpable again. Schulz’s story points to the deeply problematic consequences of such a renewal of ‘authentic experience’. It shows that a break taken from civilizational habits can unleash barbarism

Stanislaw Brzozowski and the migration of ideas: transnational perspectives on the intellectual field in twentieth-century Poland and beyond

As a writer, critic, and philosopher, Stanislaw Brzozowski (1878-1911) left a lasting imprint on Polish culture. He absorbed virtually all topical intellectual trends of his time, adapting them for the needs of what he saw as his primary mission: the modernization of Polish culture. The essays of the volume reassess and contextualize Brzozowski's writings from a distinctly transnational vantage point. They shed light on often surprising and hitherto underrated affinities between Brzozowski and intellectual figures and movements in Eastern and Western Europe. Furthermore, they explore the presence of his ideas in twentieth-century century literary criticism and theory

Zwischen Forensik und Philologie: Przemysław Dakowicz und die nationalistische Lyrik im heutigen Polen

Between Forensics and Philology: Przemysław Dakowicz and Nationalist Poetry in Contemporary Poland Using the texts of the poet and literary scholar Przemysław Dakowicz as an example, this article analyzes how the traditional martyrological discourse of the ‘romantic paradigm’ (Maria Janion) is revived in contemporary Polish poetry. The aesthetic and political instrumentalization of the symbolic link between the mass execution of Katyń in 1940 and the air crash of Smolensk in 2010 is of particular importance in this context, and, in approaching these subjects, I will suggest reading Dakowicz’s obsessive interest in the physical remains of the dead as a poetic implementation of the forensic turn that has critically manifested itself in recent years in the research of mass violence and crimes of genocide. In my discussion of the historical-political and poetic implications of this turn, I argue that Dakowicz performs a shift from the perspective of the witness to an event to that of the witness to the exhumation of physical remains and that this is how his professional background as a literary scholar comes into play. In dealing with the remnants of dead bodies, Dakowicz engages competing strategies of archiving (sighting, sifting, and safekeeping) on the one hand and hermeneutics (interpretation, revitalization) on the other. The works of the Polish historian Ewa Domańska serve as further theoretical background to this discussion (“Nekros: Introduction to the Ontology of the Dead Body,“ 2017, in Polish)

Of Slaveholders and Renegades: Semantic Uncertainties in Volodymyr Antonovych’s Conversion to Ukrainianness

Of Slaveholders and Renegades: Semantic Uncertainties in Volodymyr Antonovych’s Conversion to Ukrainianness In an article published in the St. Petersburg-based Ukrainian language journal Osnova (Foundation) in 1862, Włodzimierz Antonowicz, formally the descendant of a Polish family from the landed gentry in Ukraine, declared that from then on he would consider himself a Ukrainian. In the present essay, I analyze the polemics around what can be called Antonovych’s conversion from Polishness to Ukrainianness. Antonovych as well as his adversaries brought into play various concepts of nationality and national identity, switching quite freely between various frames of references (political thought of the Enlightenment and the Romantic era, contemporary historical fiction, and historiography).   Panowie i renegaci: semantyczne niuanse konwersji Włodzimierza Antonowicza na ukraińskość W artykule opublikowanym w 1862 roku w petersburskim ukraińskojęzycznym dzienniku „Osnova” Włodzimierz Antonowicz, formalnie potomek polskiej rodziny ziemiańskiej z Ukrainy, oświadczył, że od tego momentu będzie siebie uznawał za Ukraińca. Autor eseju analizuje polemikę wokół tego, co można nazwać konwersją Antonowicza od polskości do ukraińskości. Antonowicz, podobnie jak jego adwersarze, posługiwał się różnymi koncepcjami narodowości i tożsamości narodowej, dość swobodnie przechodząc do odmiennych odniesień w myśli politycznej (Oświecenia i epoki romantyzmu, współczesnej prozie historycznej i historiografii)

Słodko-gorzkie heterotopie. Bruno Schulz i „tekst sanatoryjny” w europejskiej literaturze okresu międzywojennego

Bittersweet heterotopias: Bruno Schulz and the ‘sanatorial text’ in european interwar literature This essay puts forward an idea to read Bruno Schulz’s story „The Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass” against the background of a specifi c genre in European literature of the interwar period, namely, the ‘sanatorial text’. This term, coined here by analogy to V. Toporov’s ‘Petersburg text’, is based upon the observation that narratives set in sanatoriums share some semantic and structural features; the most important being the heterotopic character of the sanatorial world. According to M. Foucault, a ‘heterotopia’ is a place that ‘represents’, ‘contests’ and ‘inverts’ common places in a society. In M. Proust’s Recherche…, Th. Mann’s Magic Mountain, and M. Blecher’s Scarred Hearts the heteropic setting is used to produce a feeling of estrangement. These novels explore the notions of time and society by constructing a heterotopic counter-world where the ‘ordinary’ stream of events is interrupted and life becomes intensifi ed, it is made palpable again. Schulz’s story points to the deeply problematic consequences of such a renewal of ‘authentic experience’. It shows that a break taken from civilizational habits can unleash barbarism

Ковтун, Н. В. (ed.), Кризис литературоцентризма. Утрата идентичности vs. новые возможности

КОВТУН, Н. В. (ED.), 2014. КРИЗИС ЛИТЕРАТУРОЦЕНТРИЗМА. УТРАТА ИДЕНТИЧНОСТИ VS. НОВЫЕ ВОЗМОЖНОСТИ. Москва: Флинта. ISBN: 978-5-9765-1856-8