Wisława Szymborska’s Synecdoches

The apothegms and lyric observations in the poetry of Wisława Szymborska have the nature of literal statements referring to the objective reality existing independently of the subject experiencing it. The literality understood in this way is a condition, and at the same time a consequence, of metaphorical transformation in numerous poems of Szymborska which use metonymy, synecdoche and antonomasia. Synecdoche, understood as part of a whole lending meaning to the whole, or the whole lending meaning to its part (according to Jerzy Ziomek) has the most prominence here – not only as a literary trope among other tropes within a poem, but also as an organizing principle of a poem as a whole, e.g. through frequent enumeration, characteristic of Szymborska. This constitutes a monistic image of the world, being a unity in plurality, in which enmity between different forms of being and territories of the world – people and animals, animals and plants, stones and thoughts, live and dead matter – is arbitrary and ideological, and – if specifically human, then in an ironic way.
 

Wisława Szymborska – On Anthropocentrism with Moderation

Wisława Szymborska often referred to the idea of anthropocentrism with an ironic distance and scepticism, seeing it as an expression of human pride and humanistic usurpation. The author discusses this theme of Szymborska’s writing on the example of two poems: Rozmowa z kamieniem (Conversation with a Stone) and Widok z ziarnkiem piasku (A View with a Grain of Sand). He points at philosophic trains of thought contained in them, polemical towards the tradition of Western metaphysics and epistemology, focusing also on the question of the linguistic inaccessibility of the essence of the non-human world.
 

Szymborska’s Dreams

The article is an attempt at an in-depth reading of one particular poem – Słuchawka (The Receiver) from the 2002 volume Chwila (A While) – by situating it in the context of Szymborska’s poetic and essayistic writing. This poem has a special place among other poems of Szymborska which concern dreaming, as the dream most often occurs in her poetry as a tool for diagnosing the faults of the real world or making up for them. In The Receiver, in turn, the dream opens a space of meeting with a dead person, although, contrary to earlier thematically similar poems (Negatyw (Negative), Pamięć nareszcie (Memory at Last)), the specific character of this meeting lies in the coexistence of the dead and the living. Thus read, Szymborska turns out to be a poet of transcendence, discovering a common dimension of being which joins the reality and the dream. For her, the most important task of poetry is empathy and catharsis.
 

Szymborska Zen?

On the basis of reading Szymborska’s poems, Lektury nadobowiązkowe (Non-required Reading) and some auto-thematic reflections from interviews, and referring to – among other things – the conceptions of “ordinary Buddhism” proposed by the French writer Hervé Clerc and “spontaneous enlightenment,” which the Italian scholar of Chán/Zen Aldo Tollini uses in relation to the writing of Luigi Pirandello, the author suggests that the poetic world of Wisława Szymborska is deeply immersed in Zen philosophy. There are some fundamental concepts of Zen thought that shed an interesting light on the general message of this poetry, pointing out many similarities and affinities. This concerns, for example, the ironic and antiphrastic conception of poetic language, the relation between poetry and reality, as well as the method of experiencing the world based on distance and doubt.
 

“Listen how your heart pounds inside me”. The Affective Potential of Wisława Szymborska’s Poetry

The article is an attempt at an affective reading of poems by Wisława Szymborska, who was sensitive to poetic methods and strategies of building the mental fabric of poems, creating relations of intimacy, and accentuating the tensions, emotions and moods. The essence of the emotionalism of this poetry lies in the difference between affection and affectation. Some avant-garde inspirations of Szymborska are discussed. The author of the article proposes also to read this poetry in the context of Mikhail Bakhtin’s category of “co-presence,” termed by Tzvetan Todorov as “exotopy.” Early poems by Szymborska are confronted with her later poetry, and the central meeting point are the empathy and mindfulness with which the poet treats the described characters. The author of the article focuses particularly on numerous references to the dead, who in Szymborska’s poetry function as “figures of absence.”
 

The Touch of Metaphor. On Metapoetic Aspects of Touch (Mainly) in Sad rozstajny (Bifurcated Orchard) by Bolesław Leśmian

The text is an attempt to widen the study field dealing with the senses in the world implied by the poetry of Bolesław Leśmian by including the so far neglected aspect of the essential role of touch in creating this world. The metapoetic reflection, inscribed in poems coming mainly from Leśmian’s first volume and being often the source and part of their plot, suggests the integral relation between the process of metaphorization (or, process of realizing a metaphor) and acting through touch in the presented reality. Thus understood, touch does not, however, constitute a simple metaphor of a creative act; rather, it problematizes the very (im)possibility of going beyond the “tangible” materiality of the text.
The interpretations carried out make it possible to visualize a specific – poetic – modality of touch, which is close to caress – as defined by Lévinas. In the face of the literary “reflexiveness” of that sense, the poem touches upon the non-literary reality like a shadow portending that which is not yet present.
 

„Vegetative and Telluric Ingredients”. Repulsion in the Short Stories August and Pan by Bruno Schulz

This paper is an attempt to investigate two short stories by Bruno Schulz (August and Pan) in the context of repulsion. This phenomenon was presented as an esthetical, ontological and epistemological determinant of Modernist literature. The experience of disgust was interpreted according to the elements of theoretical thought by Julia Kristeva and Mary Douglas as well as the affective turn in the humanities. It was found out that repulsion may be analysed as the main part of „topography” of Schulz’s universe: one of its main principles, both forming and deconstructing its matter.
 

The Rejected Stone? Postsecularism as a Perspective for Interpreting Polish Literature and Culture

In comparison to other theoretical orientations of recent years, postsecularism does not seem to offer favourable conditions for studying Polish culture. The possibility of transferring postsecular literature studies (J. McClure) to the field of Polish literature may seem disputable; the hitherto taken attempts, briefly presented in the article, show that as a potential “cornerstone” of new readings in Polish literature, postsecularism has been rejected. Presenting potential benefits which could be yielded by adopting postsecularism as a foundation for an alternative history of selected phenomena within modern Polish culture (chiefly literature, but also cinematography, visual arts and music), the author points at research problems whose complexity and importance can be revealed only by a failure which threatens each attempt at formulating a holistic history of literature and culture. Those research problems include: the intrinsically non-religious uses of religious language in literature; the diversity of poetics of profanity and blasphemy, the role of Communism in literary texts using the language of religion, the performative and political character of literary theologies of the Communist Poland; and secularization of the West as the topic and context of Polish-language literary texts.
 

The article is a review of a book Szczęśliwe winy teolingwizmu. Poezja polska po roku 1968 w perspektywie postsekularnej. The theoretical basis for this work derives from the contemporary postsecular thought, and the leading concepts are language, divinity, and community. Witold Wirpsza, Tymoteusz Karpowicz, Krystyna Miłobędzka, Stanisław Barańczak, Tadeusz Różewicz, Bogdan Zadura, Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki, Justyna Bargielska and Joanna Mueller constitute the core of the linguistic theology and theological poetics as described by Piotr Bogalecki, in which the spiritual is inextricably linked with the linguistic. The review stresses the special role of Wirpsza and Karpowicz for Bogalecki’s conception of the study, as well as some difficulties with placing Różewicz and Tkaczyszyn-Dycki within the theolinguistic trend, which, however, do not affect the high theoretical and interpretative quality of this excellent study.
 

Literary Post-Romanticism

The basis of the reflections contained in the article is a book by Arkadiusz Bagłajewski titled Obecność romantyzmu [The presence of Romanticism]. The author of the book considers examples of the latest poetry, prose and drama in which the presence of the Romantic tradition is manifested. The method of intertextual analysis allows the author to show different signs of the reception of Romantic legacy. Obecność romantyzmu is a voice in the scholarly discussion about traces of past eras in literature after the 1989.