Tadeusz Sławek
Konteksty Kultury, Volume 20 Issue 3, 2023, pp. 349-362
https://doi.org/10.4467/23531991KK.23.028.18831The first Polish edition of the epochal literary work Fearful Symmetry by Northrop Frye creates an occasion to reflect not only on William Blake’s place in world literature but also on his role as one of the first artists and philosophers to critically appraise the human condition in the modern world of the industrial society. It led him to – as Frye writes – demand “release of the creative power” and creation of vision of the “imaginative culture”, as such release inevitably appears as an important, if not the most important problem pertaining to society’s future. This requires new formula for spiritual experience liberated from restrictions of automatic application of “Moral Law” rules, which is inherent to institutionalised form of religion.
Tadeusz Sławek
Wielogłos, Issue 1-2 (7-8) 2010: Komparatystyka dziś, 2010, pp. 7-38
Tadeusz Sławek
Konteksty Kultury, Volume 18 Issue 2, 2021, pp. 204-207
https://doi.org/10.4467/23531991KK.21.043.14500Tadeusz Sławek
Konteksty Kultury, Volume 18 Issue 1, 2021, pp. 47-58
https://doi.org/10.4467/23531991KK.21.004.13534With the use of journals by Samuel Pepys written during the 17th-century plague epidemic in London, we discuss the issue of weak and strong evaluation discourses which create the subjectivity of an individual in its relation to a group. Our fundamental goal is therefore to discover the conditions indispensable for the emergence of a “person” whose life retains the ability to refer to “strong” moral concepts, which is necessarily connected with a phase of critical approach to hegemonic discourses. In our analysis of the text by Pypus, we postulate the emergence of a “we” phase which allows for critical reflection and temporarily frees a “person” from petrifying discourses imposed by the social “they.” This makes it possible for the “person” to come into existence and critically approach the “understanding of everyday estimations”; this takes place by referring to the strong value of opposition against “cruelty,” but this reference is fleeting and does not endure in further questioning.