By a transfigurative recoding of selfhood and a quasi-Biblical intertextual analogizing of historical events into figures across space and time, Bob Dylan shaped his initial conversion as a poetic name-change from Zimmerman-to-Dylan (as he would later write more broadly across the larger body of his poetry). This theo-poetic transformation of identity into a more poetic and spiritual being is what Norman O. Brown theorized, in Love’s Body and Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis if not throughout his works early and late, as the world-transforming tactic of “figural interpretation, [that] discovered world-historical significance in any [everyday trivial] event–an event which remains trivial for those who do not have eyes to see.” Transfiguration for Brown (as for the metaphor-rich Dylan) was not just a figural, intertextual, or rhetorical shift of tropes, it also implied all the more so a biomorphic metamorphosis of self and the world, soul and matter, bios and logos. This shift of self and the world occurs via a morphological transformation of terms and forms in the event of metanoia. Such metaphoric twists and turns of apocalyptic metamorphosis aim to remake the world into more fluid, multiple forms of becoming and uplifting as befits what a flourishing imagination longs for (via transubstantiation) and what Brown defines (and Dylan performs as) so many feats of transfigurative metamorphosis: what Brown calls “Metamorphosis, or transubstantiation.” “Transubstantiate my form, says Daphne [as the muse to poet Apollo, archetypal Greco-Roman figure] through the incarnational claim, ‘be leaf’ (belief).” In this essay, Brown will take on the role of the muse Daphne provoking and inspiring poet-figures like Apollo to embrace what he defines as the process of “be leafing” (believing) patterns. Belief would take place relentlessly in a world-transforming poet like Bob Dylan, in many ways the most important poet of his world era.

J.M. Coetzee and the Art of Change. Life and Times of Michael K in an Anthropotechnical Perspective

The article is an attempt to interpret Life and Times of Michael K as a work focused on building a conversion situation. Conversion is understood here, according to the theory by Rob Wilson, as the secularized equivalent of metanoia. The basic theoretical context is the thought of Peter Sloterdijk, who redefines religion as a spiritual exercise system and presents modernity as the domain of alternative systems of vertical tension. From this perspective, the novel by J.M. Coetzee offers a spiritual exercise for the epoch of “despiritualization of asceticism.” The protagonist’s repeated escapes and his voluntary hunger strike (juxtaposed with a similar theme in Franz Kafka’s short story) elude simple interpretations. The writer experiment with narrative strategies aimed at building a meta-allegory and ironic inversion of interpretive clichés, forcing the reader to face the imperative of a complete change of life.

Proust and Change. On Conversion Aspects in the Writer’s Biography

Starting with the structuralist and post-structuralist readings of In Search of Lost Time, which perpetuated a certain Proustian myth built around the belief that his life was converted into Text (Roland Barthes, René Girard, Julia Kristeva), the article examines the contemporary discussion on Proust’s biography in relation to an essay by French writer Claude Arnaud. His criticism of the above mentioned myth allows not only to look at the relationship between the life and work of the author of In Search in a new way, but also, above all, it opens new interpretative possibilities that break with the sacralizing view on the writer’s biography and are in line with the contemporary postulates of both the writer’s and the literature’s return to society.

Contemporary Conversion Texts: Around Elizabeth Costello

The aim of the paper is to shed light on a specific current of conversion novels gaining popularity in the most recent literature, written at the beginning of the 21st century. Heretofore such texts used to be compared to the modern novel of ideas or philosophical fiction. However, such identifications are not adequate and precise enough for new texts, exemplified first of all by the novel Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee.

Instead, an attempt is made to reveal the links of this trend to the much older tradition of conversion texts stemming from Hebrew prophetic texts and Greek protreptic writings. Yet, the analyses carried out in the article focus on emphasizing a separate identity of the contemporary texts, which not only adhere to the conventional schemata of conversion texts, but first and foremost problematize the very phenomenon of conversion rhetoric.

Hearing the Kerygma: Martin Heidegger and the New Hermeneutics. Two Preliminary Findings

This paper aims to set a foreground that will further reveal the theological and hermeneutical standpoint of Ernst Fuchs and Gerhard Ebeling. The author argues that some of their basic ideas and concepts, such as human being (Dasein), questionableness (Fraglichkeit), thrownness (Geworfenheit) or language-event (Sprachereignis), owed their origin to Martin Heidegger, but none of them could be considered a mere faded copy of their Heideggerian counterparts. New Hermeneutics were engaged in a theological verification and transposition (rather than accommodation) of Heidegger pursuing his aim of overcoming metaphysics. As a theory of language of faith and verified fundamental ontology, Lutheran hermeneutics deliberately avoided the question of “What does the biblical text actually mean?” or even “What does the text mean to me?” Instead, it took great pains to persist in asking “Why should the biblical text mean anything?” To grasp the supreme importance of this question, the author makes two preliminary observations: on the boredom with language and on radical questionableness or passivity of Dasein. In the section of the article concerning the boredom with language, the author discusses the reasons that prevent man from encountering the Word of God which does not stand for something thus transcending itself, but rather exercises its questioning and transformative power. For it is the Word of God which reveals itself as a biblical skandalon or the obstacle and threshold for Dasein. Instead of reassuring man in his self-understanding, such Word constantly calls human independence and agency into question. For that reason, replacing one language with another is no longer the major challenge. Instead, it is a kerygmatic interpretation of language aimed at restoring man’s intimacy with language as his genuine place of being. It is only a short step from here to disclosing the radical questionableness, that is a state of man becoming a question to himself. As an experience that calls the autonomy of human self into question, radical questionableness involves a divine question to which manmade reality never provides an answer that could be considered definitive, although all the provided answers remain binding. Consequently, such experience reveals a historical and passive path of human being before the divine Word, a path which violates metaphysical constitution of subjectivity and therefore transforms the purpose of proclamation and the meaning of kerygma. As a call and challenge to man, or an answer given by the wholly other God to the question concerning man, kerygma makes Dasein finally capable of entering a relationship with the Word which does not violate divine sovereignty. For it is kerygma that brings the ecstatic nature of man to the fore. Kerygma establishes a speaking-hearing interplay of God and man and makes hearing the basic form of man’s being before God. Such relationship consists therefore in nothing but a responsible acceptance of a gift, that is hearing the divine Word.

Artur Sandauer’s Translation of the Bible as a Medium of Literary Conversion to Modern Marranism

The article considers Bible translation as a potentially converting experience for the translator and for the readers. It is a case study of the work of an important Polish literary critic, Artur Sandauer, who in 1977 translated the Book of Genesis and published it with an extensive commentary, becoming a part of a “biblical boom” that happened in Poland from 1965 to 1985 (as a result of the Second Vatican Council). Numerous translations of the Bible were initiated at that time by both religious institutions and lay individuals of various backgrounds. Sandauer, a Holocaust survivor, was one of the last such translators and his attitude towards existing denominations was particularly complicated. The article identifies textual strategies that he uses to challenge the sanctity of the Bible, aiming for spiritual independence of himself and the potential reader. This type of postsecular, literature-oriented biblical translation has the hallmarks of a conversion text, although the change that would be made in the translator and the reader is unstable, and, as such, akin to the status of a modern marrano.

Conversions of “Autothematicism,” or Autothematicismas a Possibility of a Turn

The article is an attempt to describe autothematicism [autotematyzm] – a term coined in Poland by Artur Sandauer in the mid-20th century, referring to the quality of radically meta-reflexive works – from seven complementary perspectives. The Sandauerian understanding of the concept of metareflection was slightly different from the Western visions of mise-en-abyme or metafiction; it was described in the context of German idealistic philosophy and aesthetics. Sandauer defined the artistic “theme” as an objectivization of content (an author’s perceptions and experiences); therefore “autothematicism” is not synonymous with the other terms mentioned above, which can provide interesting interpretations of self-referential works. The present paper shows that the Sandauerian concept of self-referentiality can be seen as an end product of various transformations (conversions): literature’s (or the subject’s) retreat from all kinds of transcendence and reality, self-reflection of the creative “I,” or the text’s orientation to its own ontology. However, this understanding can be reversed. Autothematicism (as an operative concept) can also be seen as a mechanism that enables the autonomous positioning of art in relation to the “reality” it co-constructs, which enables literature to take active participation in the rebuilding of the world.

“Deformations of Retrograde Memory.” Re-Turns, Recurrences and Conversions in Andrzej Kuśniewicz’s Nawrócenie [Conversion/Recurrence]

This article is devoted to Nawrócenie [Conversion/Recurrence], the last novel of Andrzej Kuśniewicz. The author proposes an interpretation putting special emphasis on the ambiguous and polysemic eponymous category, which is referred to as: the literary topos of (distorted) memory and fantasmatic re-turn into the past; recurrence as an autofictional gesture of processing that past in the realm of literary speculation; finally – a conversion, which may be understood twofold – as a process of not only religious but also ethical transformation or even re-creation of the subject, or as a deep renegotiation of the subject’s identity, given that this very subject is internally conflicted and incoherent. Analyzed in the article are overt and hidden autobiographical motifs in the novel, especially those connected to Kuśniewicz’s complicated stance towards philo- and anti-Semitism as well as (non)remembrance of the Shoah. The main concepts and tools used in the discussion are drawn from discourses of psychoanalysis and philosophy of history (especially Eelco Runia’s notions of “metonymy” and “presence”).

On the Restorative Power of Literature in Alexandre Gefen’s Essay Réparer le monde. La littérature française face au XXI^e siècle [Repairing the World. French Literature Facing the 21st Century]

The aim of this paper is to discuss Alexandre Gefen’s essay published in 2017 in which the researcher presents the panorama of latest French prose in the perspective of responsibility for the world and fixing it. The author notes that Gefen also discusses texts from the two last decades of the 20th century, which shows that it was in that period that French writers started to take interest in the human identity and relationship with the world. One of the important genres analyzed by Gefen is autobiography, well-established in the French literary tradition. Another significant matter is the current transformation of literary practices, of the position of the writer and the reader, and of the publishing market, which Gefen also analyzes from the perspective of restoration and therapeutic literature that should care for the readers and heal them. Gefen’s essay is presented as a text encouraging its reader to reflect deeply on the condition of the contemporary world.