Ryszard Nycz - Böcker

The volume From Modern Theory to a Poetics of Experience contains a wide selection of essays, which were published during past decades in academic journal Teksty Drugie and were widely appreciated as significant contributions to the ongoing debate on principles and methods of literary studies. Articles gathered in this collection represent the main schools, tendencies and perspectives applied in contemporary criticism, including the most recent developments and the older traditions, which previously influenced our field. Their chronological succession seems to indicate certain direction of this development, which has moved literary studies from text-oriented, purely scientific procedures to more contextualized, interpretative approaches, labeled here as «poetics of experience».

Emotions as ‘the early form of knowledge about the surrounding world’ constitute a necessary component of the human psyche. Nevertheless, through the ages of the development of mankind, the emotional aspect was often regarded as a dispensable part of human nature, which should be fully ruled by reason. Despite the general opinion about the necessary control of reason over emotions, the possible participation of the latter in the human decision making processes was taken into consideration already in Antiquity. The dealing with the ethical aspect of emotions was one of the prevailing issues in the works of Euripides. In his tragedy of Phaedra the poet gives the broadest description of the process, which can be observed in a man afflicted with ‘emotional obsession’. The reception of this topos can also be considered in the tragedies of Roman philosopher Seneca, and modern French poet Jean Racine. This book was awarded as the best PhD thesis in culture field in Poland in 2009.

This book debunks the myth of Polish Modernist literature as rooted in rash, immediate expression. The author compares programmatic statements on language by turn-of-the-century writers such as Wacław Berent, Bolesław Leśmian, Stanisław Brzozowski or Karol Irzykowski with notions deduced from their literary works. He demonstrates that these writers’ linguistic self-consciousness informs their implicitly self-reflexive texts and sheds light on their values and characteristic qualities. The author treats Modernist literature itself as a sort of «language» – a distinct entity that emerged through systematic differentiation within the general literary discourse. The book enhances the understanding of the transformations behind this important philosophical and artistic movement.

Translation Studies has been in action in the Polish humanities since 1930s. The book gathers the most important contributions from Polish translation scholars working in the context of Literary and Cultural Studies as well as Linguistics. The essays offer insights into the conceptualisation of translation, stylistics and poetics, history and anthropology of translation. Most of them are made available in English for the first time. The editors’ introduction provides a panoramic backdrop for concepts, methodologies and applications. As part of the tendency to enlarge Translation Studies and include new contexts into its mainstream, this reader gives an overview of a rich area of translation scholarship from the centre of Europe, a crossroads of influences and traditions.

Critical revised edition and translation by Jean WardThis book presents a universal theory of autobiography, defined as a "triangular" form of utterance involving three different stances. It is a personal testimony to experiences lived through, a confession of intimate inner experience and a challenge addressed to the reader to engage in dialogue, enter into an argument or join in a game. The stances of witness, confession and challenge are always present, though usually one of them overshadows the other two. Polish memoirs, diaries and letters, as well as novels of a clearly personal character, are interpreted here in the context of the most important autobiographical texts of European literature. In the background, also, the historical events which have powerfully stamped Polish culture in the last two centuries are discreetly shown.

This book illustrates the problems connected with the body and the sign: the real body and the body of the text, somaticism and semiology (both as a general sign theory and in the medical sense as «symptomatology»). The author seeks to derive a more general principle from these two words, referring to the representation of experience in different literary texts. If we are talking about the representation of experience, we cannot, by any means, ignore the body that becomes the essential point of reference for human experience. This general principle aims at creating a matter of concept, a somatic criticism project, which is closely related to the issue of rhythm in literary texts - a rhythm understood as an intermediary between the body and the sense of the text.

This book presents a collection of essays discussing a history of the five myths of Dionysus, Narcissus, Prometheus, Marcolf, and Labyrinth in twentieth-century literature. The author traces their transformations against the wider backdrop of Polish and European literature. The book is an excellent, thought-provoking lesson in understanding the signs of contemporary culture and a fascinating journey through its complex trails.

This book presents the rhetorical means of creating discourses about a writer and examines how the critic’s viewpoint mediated via rhetoric tropes interplays with cultural institutions and their rules (newspaper criticism, university, schools). It eventually shows the place of literature in culture and the workings of cultural memory. The book studies rhetorics, discourse, and social psychology applied to cultural institutions. In this respect, it offers a completely innovative approach and method. The author also provides an exemplary study of the famous Polish modernist poet and writer Miron Białoszewski, and presents a detailed guide and an account of his way towards becoming a major figure in Polish culture.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the entirety of Wisława Szymborska’s poetic oeuvre. The author employs in-depth historical reflection on Szymborska’s beginnings to reveal that – without describing her post-war beginnings and reflecting on her early entanglement in socialist realist newspeak – Szymborska’s mature anti-dogmatic attitude will remain unclear. The book shows how Szymborska’s rhetoric and stylistics – figures of reservation, negation, contradiction, tautology, and repetition – are closely connected with the construction of the poetic world and affect the shape of her messages. After all, Wisława Szymborska is a poet of sophisticated wit, a surprising freedom of expression, and an unusual game with various literary styles, even with colloquial Polish.

The Persona of Czesław Miłosz considers the poetry of Miłosz in the innovative light of world literature and comparative literary studies. The author employs critical debates about Miłosz in American and English literature to reshape the image of his reception. The book masterfully elaborates Miłosz’s poetics of perspectivism with a new method of analysis based on the category of authorial persona—between reception, poetics, and close-reading—separate from the literary persona. Each chapter encapsulates introductory information about Polish literature and moves beyond the horizon of Western expectations about Central European writers. Miłosz’s most discussed poems reveal new provocative power in the context of T. S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, William Blake, and Friedrich Nietzsche.To date, no work comprehensively examines Miłosz’s self-proclaimed contradictory nature and the nomadic quality of his works. As a result, scholarship remains scattered in diverse areas of interest, moving Miłosz to the margins of world literature, instead of cherishing the diversity of perspectives he championed, among other places, in his Nobel Lecture. Without properly appreciating the poetics of contradiction proposed by Miłosz and a critical analysis of his process of self-situation, we narrow his impact on literature only to Polish poetry, effectively allowing for a petrification of his innovative methods. The Persona of Czesław Miłosz remedies this gap by revealing that, in contrast to Polish and American literary reception, Miłosz was an eccentric eulogist of the concept of a multi-perspectivist persona. Through close examinations of Miłosz’s poetry, we learn that he develops a method of oscillating between ideas in search of lasting symbols common to all, beginning unfailingly with his current perspective. After all, Miłosz persistently placed himself outside of the consensus and maneuvered the subject matter of his works to such an extent that his works became his philosophy of literature and the way of life.

The book depicts the phenomenon of cultural memory preserved in the Polish Romantic literature, predominantly in the works of Mickiewicz, Słowacki, and Norwid (and other European poets). The primary objective is to reconstruct the cultural pattern of continuity established in Poland during the period of catastrophe. The author describes the call for a critical historiography and presents a "Slavic counterpoint" in the history of modern Europe. The key questions of the book are: Will the Romantic lesson about the transformation of history into memory and turning the past into an object of faith turn out to be a lesson about the future? The book is inspired by the German trend of contemporary reflection – "the culture of remembrance" (Erinnerungskultur) founded on the works of the Assmanns.

This book is unique in both its subject matter and its approach. It focuses on the collaboration of J. Derrida, J.-F. Lyotard, J. Hillis Miller, D. Carroll, F. Jameson and others at the Critical Theory Institute at the University of California, Irvine and on the application of critical theory for the analysis of contemporary American visual art. The critical and philosophical analysis concerns the art of Bruce Nauman, Kosuth, Burden, Christo, Wodiczko, Johns, Rauschenberg, and others. The focus of the book is on irony and the sublime.The book also includes the original Prologue by G. van Den Abbeele (Dean of the School of Humanities at UC Irvine 2013-2018) on the history of Critical Theory in the United States, and at UCI, in particular. The CTI’s uniqueness consisted in it being one of the best centers of the Critical Theory studies in the United States.

The book is the first systematic study of the beginnings of psychoanalysis on Polish lands in Galicia (Austria-Hungary) and Congress Poland (Russia) during the partitions of Poland in the years between 1900 and 1918. The birth of the movement was presented on a broad cultural background, as an element of the assimilation processes among Polish Jews. At the same time, Freud's and Jung's theories began to gain popularity in Polish medical, philosophical, artistic and literary circles. By 1918, over a dozen articles on psychoanalysis had been published in Polish scientific and philosophical journals. Freud himself was vitally interested in this process, sending Ludwig Jekels to Krakow in the role of – as he wrote – an "apostle" of his theory in the circles of the Polish intelligentsia.

This book discusses the direction of changes in contemporary culture at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries in Poland on the example of mutual relationships between literature and the media, such as film, radio, TV and the Internet. The interdisciplinary approach adopted by the author combines literary and media studies with the perspectives of social communication, anthropology and sociology of culture. The book focuses on topics such as reconfiguration of culture, expansion of the media, situation of literature and the central place of audio-visual parallels (auteur film, TV series, PC games). The author notes that both literature and the media are situated between art and communication today and both share the meta-cultural role of natural languages.

The book describes the system of communist censorship in Poland in the years 1948–1958, as well as its effects on the development of literature. It is the first literary studies work which takes up the subject in such broad and systematic terms. The book is divided into three main parts: an attempt at synthesis (theory and practice of censorship), special cases (censorship of specific writers), authorial strategies (the authors’ ways of dealing with censorship) and contexts.The most important conclusion which can be drawn from the research is that out of many small changes emerges an image of a very significant one. Numerous small cuts and alterations build up to an image of Polish literature of the 1940s and 1950s as a whole. A whole that was always dependant on and subservient to politics.

Tomasz Garbol’s book reconstructs Czesław Miłosz’s poetic vision of the world after the Fall. The entry point to this approach is the conviction about the ambivalence of previous interpretations of Miłosz’s works, especially about his bipolar poetic worldview (his intellectual and existential division between pessimism and ecstasy) and his understanding of the consequences of the Fall (reversible or fatalistic). The book is a literary studies take on the relationship between literature and religion. The main direction is that Miłosz’s main need in art comes from his yearning for contact with the meaning of reality, which he seeks in the activity of poetic imagination.

The monograph presents the Polish history of haiku and the forms associated with this genre – in literature and visual arts. Polish works are confronted with Japanese poetry (along with its aesthetic, philosophical and ethical contexts) and with haiku-inspired miniatures produced by poets from various European and American countries. The book also touches upon the theory of literary genres and translatological problems (translations of Japanese haiku as a touchstone of changes in Western literature). The presented discussion with haiku as the central theme allows for a unique and panoramic perspective of Polish poetry of the last hundred years. It also facilitates original analyses of the relationship between literature and visual arts – in the field of book art, painting and multimedia.

Is the prose poem revolutionary and subversive, or marginal and lyrical? What makes a piece of prose a prose poem? Is its identity vague or precisely defined? Can every poem written in prose be considered a prose poem, a form influenced by the brilliant invention of French literature and by authors such as Baudelaire or Rimbaud? Agnieszka Kluba discusses the prose poem by providing a comprehensive summary of the existing approaches to it, but also by proposing an original conception of this form of writing. Kluba does not limit herself to considerations within literary genre theory and remains close to the poetic texts she considers. Following the intricate line of the prose poem, in Polish and European literature, she carefully assigns to prose poetry a place in Modern literary history.

The turn of the twentieth and twenty-first century brought about sweeping technological changes which impacted our way of functioning in society. One of those constitutes the transition from analog to digital photography.The aim of this monograph is to capture these changes and their image preserved in poetry written after 1989, based on Polish literature. To highlight the changes that occurred alongside the digital revolution, and indicate contact points between contemporary poetry and photography, both analog and digital, the author employs new tools and terms from the field of literary studies, such as “photo-grapheme” and “photo-graphemic.”

The book is designed as a methodological exercise in cultural studies described as "engaging", which refers to a specific research approach requiring cooperation and the inclusion of individuals and communities in the research process, using a rich repertoire of humanistic traditions as a tool of social criticism. The key is to treat cultural studies as a workshop in which the researcher changes from a distant observer into a practical person – a public intellectual and craftsman at the same time. The turn from “engaged” to “engaging” research methodologies described in the book is strongly rooted in the tradition of the philosophy of praxis and the theory of social practices, from Aristotle, through Marxist theories, to contemporary participatory action research. Today, however, the practical approach in the humanities takes on particular importance in the context of the so-called ontological turn. The book tries to answer the question whether cultural studies based on the category of practice has a chance to be a new form of critical thinking under the conditions of post-anthropocentric humanities.

This book explores the influence and reception of Witold Gombrowicz’s works in Argentina, where he spent over two decades and wrote much of his oeuvre. It examines the "Gombrowicz effect" in Argentinian literature, investigating who read his works, how his themes were integrated or ignored, and his impact on Argentinian culture and literature.Using comparative literature methods, the author analyses the case of Gombrowicz’s literary appropriation. The study starts with key Spanish translations of Gombrowicz’s texts and then assesses a series of Argentinian critical essays on his works. It focuses significantly on Argentinian writers, such as Ricardo Piglia, César Aira, and Osvaldo Lamborghini, who were influenced by Gombrowicz and engaged critically with his literature and his legendary life in Argentina.

The book deals with what the author calls the new humanities: a broad and diversified front of orientations, directions, and turns grouped around five major currents: the digital humanities, engaged humanities, cognitive humanities, art-based research, and posthumanities. What links these approaches is their opposition toward the principles of the modern theory of humanistic cognition, which appears to be immaterial, external, impersonal, static, and neutral. Against this model, the new humanities posit a different type of cognition: embodied, penetrating the interior of the studied field, personalized (participatory), active (intervening), and situated (engaged). With this significant change, we proceed from the culture of disinterested observation, founded on the myth of contemplative view of the external world, to the real culture of participatory action, which is reconciled with the perspectivity and partiality of the subject’s cognitive actions and which paves the way to reality from within and in its own right.

The Futurists produced most conspicuous, creative, and diverse figures of sound in the Polish avant-garde. The book is a comparative study of the Polish Futurists’ works presented against the backdrop of European literary practices of the time (Dadaism, Italian and Russian Futurism) and the Polish literary tradition (folk poetry, Young Poland). S´niecikowska examines variations on symbolist “musicality,” traces similarities between Polish Futurist word formation and Cubo-Futurist experimentation, compares Dadaist and Futurist concepts of onomatopoeia, analyses applications of Marinetti’s “words in freedom.” The study also deals with uses of glossolalia and echolalia as well as sound-semantic concepts that employ pure nonsense and parody.

The eponymous inter esse means the elusive “third” position of that which lies between, that which escapes unambiguous classification and constitutes the essence of Romanticism. The book provides a constellation of texts, a clash of case studies that provide contrasting views of Romanticism, shifting between inspiration and virtuosity (Hugo and Mickiewicz), feminine poetry and the fantasy of femininity (Desbordes-Valmore and Z˙michowska; de Nerval and Krasin´ski), along with optimistic versus pessimistic—even nihilistic—reactions to disenchantment with the Enlightenment (Novalis, Krasin´ski, Malczewski, Macha, Bonaventura, Buchner, Goszczyn´ski).‘Siwiec’s comparative analysis … juxtaposes the familiar with the foreign, taking Polish and foreign-language writers under critical literary scrutiny. As a result, we receive a study that is not only exceptionally insightful, original, and engaging for the reader from the very beginning but also composed almost mathematically, striking with its transparent order.’– Jerzy Jarniewicz, University of Lodz