Ruch Literacki

The article considers the past, the present, and the future of philology, trying to find a language that best fits its development. The main point is that from the very beginning, at the turn of the 19th century, philology was divided into three areas of specialization – grammar, criticism, and hermeneutics – which gave birth to separate disciplines that dominated the modern approach to texts. Grammar morphed into linguistics, criticism into proper philology, and hermeneutics into literary studies, and this development shattered the unity of the discipline, since then on exposed to separate interests and protocols. Wondering if there is an essence of philology in modern times, the article brings different philosophical and literary contexts against which this assumption is tested.

The first part the article contains a critical analysis of the contemporary model of literary and philological studies, which have their roots in the 19th century. Political literary criticism entrapped in the hermeneutics of suspicion takes the brunt of the criticism. In the second part the author lays out an alternative model of literary and philological studies based on the ideas of Hannah Arendt.

The aim of this article is to make out the most adequate intellectual reference frame for the work and thought of Wincenty Korab-Brzozowski and identify in each case the nature of his dependence or affinity. The points of reference are as follows: the natural philosophers of the Ionian school (the cyclical view of time and history, reality is shaped by the elements, the interaction of matter in the world of spirit), the Stoics (theory of being), Heraclitus of Ephesus (the concept of Logos, metaphysics and cosmology), and Camille Flammarion (extra-terrestrial life).

This article examines the tertium comparationis of Plato's critique of poetry and Zbigniew Herbert's reflections about the mission and message of art. Plato banishes poetry from his ideal city, but the ban is not total. There are some kinds of poetry that would be allowed to flourish, though what they are is left to guess. The 'good' poetry is defined only by negation, in discussions of the defects of even the most highly regarded compositions like Homer's epics. Be that as it may, let us ask a speculative question about poems that could actually pass Plato's test of excellence? Could, perhaps, Herbert's poetry be the obverse of Plato's negative examples, their counterpart, like them made of words, the material of poetry? Answered in the positive, the question becomes a proposition in need of proof. This is done by examining Plato's key concerns – the relation of art to truth, the paideic function of poetry, and the primacy of ethics over aesthetics. Practically in every respect Herbert appears to follow Plato and be at odds with the Avant-garde. Given Herbert's high moral seriousness, one would be tempted to ask another speculative question: Would he follow Plato in banishing the poets from the ideal polis?

The author of the article discusses post-anthropocentric threads in Kornel Filipowicz's stories and proved that describing the writer as posthumanist, characterized by contemporary ecological sensitivity, is possible on the condition of noticing the aporia between zoocritical narratives and his passion for fishing. The author of Unshakable Landscape has commented on the moral dilemmas associated with fishing and depriving them of their lives several times. The awareness of the existence of aporia between the desirable relations between humans and animals, presented in some of the stories, and angling practices, means that Filipowicz does not hide as a progressive writer who follows a fashionable theme. He remains an artist who faces dilemmas that also occupy animal activists today. The author of the article reconstructs Filipowicz's environmental awareness, referring to his writing output and biography by Justyna Sobolewska, checks how the protagonists of the stories treat fish and other animals, and discusses strategies for writing about the problem of violence against animals.

The aim of this article is to outline two philosophical approaches to metaphor that were developed in the 20th century. The first contends that metaphor opens up the possibility of liberating philosophical discourse from the prison of rigid conceptual schemes and can guide us to a new metaphysics founded on some deep, hidden, revelatory knowledge which eludes both empirical and rational inquiry. Paul Ricoeur, the author La metaphore vive (1975) is regarded as the main representative of this approach, but, as the article shows, his way of thinking about metaphor and its role made its appearance already in the 1920s and 1930s, and found its brilliant synthesis in Geneza metaforei şi sensul culturii, the second volume of the monmental Trilogia culturii by the Romanian philosopher Lucian Blaga. The second approach was inaugurated by Nietzsche with his “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense” and had its continuation in the thought of Heidegger, Derrida and De Man. Nietzsche insists that philosophical (metaphysical) discourse has no better claim to the truth than metaphor. Metaphor is at the root of language; metaphors are older than language; and metaphors underpin language in all its constructions and uses (rhetoric, tropology). Carried to its conclusion this argument leads to the dissolution of the borders between philosophy and poetry, and, in effect, the death of philosophy.

This article offers an interpretation of Wiktor Woroszylski’s book of poetry The last time (Ostatni raz). The starting point is reflection on the late works of this author, with the writer's illness also playing an important role. However, the most important problem is a specific situation of understanding, that can be defined as the hermeneutics of dying. It is connected with self-understanding, gaining knowledge about one's own mortality and searching for the meaning of life. The problem is considered in several thematic areas, such as the death of Others, everyday life, hospital reality, life story, nature, God, writing, love. The analyzed situation refers to self-poetic experiencing the last period of life, consciously understanding as the process of dying (which, in turn, is understood as a gradual, understanding farewell to the world). Temporal dimension of understanding is important, as well as performative aspect of works and their specific form (autobiographicity, unconventional honesty, simplifying the form, irony, elegiac nature of poem, sketch-note).

This article presents a reading of Edward Stachura's Siekierezada (Axing, or the
Winter of the Forest Folk, 1971) focused on the main characters Janek Pradera and his
doppelgänger, whose function is to harass and victimize his other self. What may be
regarded as a Romantic (Gothic) throwback is in fact, as the article argues, a narrative
of the traumatic experience diagnosed by Franz Ruppert as the Identity Oriented
Psycho Trauma. The term 'dividuum' in the title refers both to the process of an
individual turning upon oneself / developing a double (as is the case in Siekierezada)
and its psychological background treated as a manifestation of psychotrauma.