Tadeusz Slawek – författare

A relationship between man and place has always attracted scientists’, scholars’, and artists’ attention. Succinctly subsumed in the concept of genius loci and implicated in the art of visual and linguistic description, topography of man’s existence invited debates among such disciplines as geography, economy, ecology, history, and philosophy. Revelations of Gloucester is a book which, including elements of all these areas of research, focuses on the variety of problems generated by the process of representing a place. Occupying a very special position on the cultural and historical map of the US, the city of Gloucester has had at least two champions of outstanding stature: Charles Olson, a leading avantgarde poet of the 1950s and 1960s whose Maximus Poems is one of the most ambitious modern attempts at creating a sequence of place-related verses, and Fitz Hugh Lane, a mid-nineteenth century American luminist painter who, from his Gloucester harbor house, investigated painterly and philosophical secrets of American light. Thus, the emphasis of the book is double: applying theoretical insights of phenomenology and deconstruction, it discusses the aesthetic and intellectual significance of both artists in relation to their home territory and tries to reconnoitre the metaphore of light seminal for the tradition of American transcendentalism.

This study takes up Thoreau’s work as an early and prophetic diagnosis of the modern crisis of relationships between the individual and society. Thus Adorno’s formulation of «a melancholy of science» finds its predecessor in Thoreau’s famous dictum from the early pages of Walden that we live our lives in quiet desperation. The author reads Thoreau’s Journal as an attempt to refute tendencies towards the narrowing of life to being understood merely in techno-economic categories which threaten the quality of the development of both the individual and the community. Thus in literary scholarship it is essential to find strategies which will critically contribute to understanding and transforming what Auerbach called «ways of life» and what Barthes referred to as «living-together».