Joanna Orska

What is theory’s experience?
The review on the new book by Ryszard Nycz, The Poetics of Experience, engages in polemic with an anthropological-literary project of the author. On one hand, the review seeks to realise the theoretical outcome given by the new conditions of anthropological, experience reading of the literature and culture. On the other, it’s being diputed, how far actually are going the changes at the literary theory research field, that are being assumed in Nycz’s book.

Jan Błoński and the criticism of consciousness

The research Błoński and Criticism of Consciousness (in the field of Polish literary research ‘thematic criticism’) considers the presence of this particular French tradition, very important to Błoński, in terms of his critical approach and conceptions and in his very critical practise. Błoński was the translator and the editor of the selection of philosophical-critical texts of Gaston Bachelard and George Poulet (i.a.). Especially the last one made a significant impact on critical imagination of the Polish literary scholar. The author of this essay collating the theses from Błoński’s book on Proust and excerpts from his translations from Poulet’s Time, shows the resemblance of the „thematic” presumptions, arguments and conclusions, that both critics apply to the work of Proust.
 

The Absence of Miłobędzka

This article considers the critical reception of poetic work of Krystyna Miłobędzka, the way it was performed till the beginning of 1990’s. The literary criticism in Poland was largely determined by then by the discourse of the academic literary studies. Furthermore – the most prominent voice in the poetical and critical dialog with Miłobędzka – Tymoteusz Karpowicz being the neoavantgarde poet himself – carried out the reading that was depending on his philosophical reading of Heideggerian phenomenology. Certain pattern of understanding Miłobędzka’s work, created at large by Karpowicz’s text Metafora otwarta (An Open Metaphor) seems to be neglecting certain thesis posited by Miłobędzka herself as an author of many meta-poetical statements, that could be read as the late avantgarde manifesto of her own.    

Poets-Translators as the “Avant-Garde” of the 1990s

David Lehman in his book The Last Avant-Garde. The Making of the New York School of Poets sustains the avant-garde character of the New York School (painters and poets), pointing to the resistance of the public to their works as to one of the symptoms showing their anti-normative and emancipatory message. New experimental poetry in post-transformational Poland of the 1990s was, in general, following the innovations of foreign neo-avant-garde practices – in respect to the methods, interests, and creative ideas. The New York School tradition became the main source of inspiration, due to its reception by poets-translators of the circle of “Literatura na Świecie” magazine: Piotr Sommer, Bohdan Zadura, Andrzej Sosnowski, and Tadeusz Pióro. This article shows that their literary statements on art, which could be seen as programmatic in the avant- -garde way, displayed certain outlines similar to the New York School ideas. One might risk the thesis that at the turn of the centuries in Poland not only American neo-avant-garde poetry aroused the interest of Polish poets-translators. Also the programme of the New York School poets, however vague, became important for their experience and it was being “translated” alongside the poems, though its features would turn out different in Polish conditions.

New Criticism Attempts
The article constitutes a polemic with two critical books containing a proposition of a different, extra-institutional conception of literary narration. Joanna Mueller’s publication entitled Stratygrafie constitutes an attempt to create a comprehensive mythology of the world, one whose genome would be made up of poetry. According to the principle which unifies various experiences, a poetic work would contain senses which an active reading – understood here rather in the categories of a fertile „aberration” than in the sense of traditional reading with understanding – should only make present. In turn, in Anna Kałuża’s Bumerang (Boomerang), the phenomenon of poetic art is treated in anti-creative categories and is rather bound up with communication, as well as with socio-political contexts. Kałuża reiterates after Wolfgang Welsh that we are currently living in an era of post-demystification and whenever reality, which is created for us by pop culture, assumes in its entirety the shape of an aesthetic construct, there is no possibility of transgressing the boundary-line between art and life.