Andrzej Zawadzki

This article presents an attempt at a phenomenological reading of several selected poems by Miron Białoszewski. Phenomenological tools were not often used in the study of this writer’s work. The author of the article argues that this state of affairs was caused, on the one hand, by the dominance of formal and structural analyses, which was noticeable up to a certain point, and on the other hand, by the concept of a layer of linguistic meanings, contained in Roman Ingarden’s book On the Literary Work. The poet’s works selected for analysis are treated in the article from a different perspective than Ingarden’s, namely as phenomenological minianalyses, showing the process of constructing the objective world.

Oblicza hermeneutyki (Faces of Hermeneutics) by Paweł Dybel covers many important problems of contemporary hermeneutics and can be read in many ways. First of all, it is an apology of hermeneutics and an attempt to define a hermeneutical model of understanding as opposed to some other models developed by, mostly, psychoanalysis and the so-called hermeneutics of suspicion. Secondly, Dybel tries to show specific features of hermeneutic thinking by situating hermeneutics between philosophy and human sciences. His own vision of hermeneutics is shaped mostly by Gadamers’s idea of understanding as dialogue, conversation, mediation. The author also outlines the history of filological hermeneutics, from Luther to some contemporary theorists and investigates certain ethical and anthropological issues of hermeneutics.

The article constitutes an attempt to present in a synthetic way the main assumptions behind the fundamental trends in the comparative studies of the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as their evolution. Following the predominance of the influential model which had developed since the middle of the 19th century and focused chiefly on the genetic research of literary affiliations, and which had assumed the existence of a national literature as an organic entity, since the sixties of the 20th century, there arises a new perspective in comparative studies, where the fundamental role is played by thematic and structural categories (motif, concept, topic, genre, current etc.). The nineties of the 20th century bring yet another attempt to reformulate the methods of comparative studies and to abandon focusing on literary studies, in favor of cultural research in comparative studies, where the fundamental role is played, among others, by issues such as the concept of power, gender, race and also review and multi-, inter- and transculturalism

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.
 

The essay Symploke as a figure of mimesis in Plato’s philosophy is an attempt to reconstruct two different models of mimesis in Plato’s thought. The first model (Repulic) is ontological and based on the notion of truth as manifestation of real being (eidos or physis). Here, a copy or imitation is but a non-being, an appearance, or „a weak being” that participates in the true being only to a very small extent. The second model (The Sophist) is epistemological and based on the notion of truth as resemblance between an object and a copy. Here, an image is good if it is perfectly similar to the object it represents. Both models of mimesis cannot be treated separately. Their subtle interpenetration can be seen in the Platonic figure of symploke (a „plexus”) from The Sophist, in which being and non-being, truthfulness and falsity unexpectedly show their paradoxical unity.

The article presents an attempt to trace, in the tradition of Christian hermeneutics, the origin of an idea which plays an important role in the entire modern hermeneutical discourse, namely – the idea of infinite interpretation. Today, it is regarded as a feature of radical (Vattimo), post-structuralist (Foucault) hermeneutics which questions, in many ways and starting from different traditions of thought and with different premises, the belief that the meaning of a text is univocal, given once and for all, closed, and the work of an interpreter is only limited to its extraction, unambiguous understanding, reconstruction.
However, in early Christian tradition of Patrology, e.g. in the works of St. Gregory the Great, one can find traces of such approach to the interpretation of the Scriptures, in which the reading does not mean discovery of a given sense but its active development: Scriptura cum legentibus crescit, Scripture grows with those who read it. This approach seems to be especially close to Vattimo’s concept of productive interpretation, i.e. an interpretation which contributes to the meaning of the text in the act of interpretation, multiplying the senses of human experience.

Three glosses to Tolkien

The paper is an attempt to interpret selected motives and themes in Tokien’s The Lord of the Rings with the help of some concepts taken from dialectical thinking, hermeneutics and Lacanian psychoanalysis.