The essay is devoted to the following problem: how is it possible to search for a link between genetical analysis of the rough draft and the reflection about the spatial and social surroundings, within which the creative action took place. “Environment” here is understood, firstly, as the very same sheet of paper, used by the author to create the poem, secondly, as the interpersonal and social relation, that stimulates (but also limits) creative subject’s activity, thirdly, as the “hospital”, what means: a material space, an institution and a social situation), in which the creative subject strives to preserve their subjectivity. As the cases studied in this kind of “regime of interpretation” serve the working manuscript left by three major Polish poets of twentieth century: Czesław Miłosz, Tadeusz Różewicz and Zbigniew Herbert.

By examining the manuscript materials of Guo Songfen (1938–2005) linked specifically to his last work, Luojiu Hua (The Falling of All the Followers), the paper aims to focus on the creative mode revealed by the manuscripts which can be characterized as a file system that avails itself of indexes and labels of sorts. These are first made up of initial scenario comments projecting either tentative titles or the overall structure of the work and more importantly, hidden quotations or short excerpts that Guo leaves meticulous citation information. Because they are seamlessly sutured into the very fabric of the text, no visible traces of their previous lives can be discerned in a reading without the benefit of the manuscript materials. To some degree, these short excerpts are textual transplants – visibly only if we take a deeper dive into the creative process and related manuscripts – verily alien grafts, that seemingly work silently within the textual machine. What are these textual transplants sutured into the text doing there, especially in a work that deals with memory and historical and personal traumas and national displacements at the fall of the Qing empire and the onset of civil wars which will give birth to and define modern China and Taiwan? This paper aims to look at the textual transplants from the perspective of their indexing function, that is, how they serve both as links to cultural and historical memory, that is, as an archiving and accessing tool but because the transplants are often montage-like, they also become means of historical intervention, a dialectical imaging tool in Walter Benjamin’s sense, at the time of profound crisis which thinkers and writers such as Benjamin and Gou must live through. During the discussion, Daniel Ferrer’s relevant discussion of contextual memory and Eggert’s concept of the relation between archive and edition will also be employed to better understand the issues at hand. In short, we can look at these textual wedges as both an effort to solder personal memory and the collective memory, a personal wedge into the general environment and the collective and intertextual memory. On the other hand, we will see that the textual wedges also unhinge and therefore drive a wedge between the collective and our access or appropriation of it.

The purpose of my paper is to demonstrate that the theory of the “death of the author” formulated by Roland Barthes in the late 1960s can be read in the context of the sanatorium treatment he underwent between 1942 and 1946, since the experience of tuberculosis was inscribed in two unpublished drafts Barthes wrote after leaving the sanatorium, namely Esquisse d’une societe sanatoriale [Sketch of a Sanatorium Society] and L’Avenir de la rhetorique [The Future of Rhetoric]. By pointing out the similarities between The Future of Rhetoric and The Death of the Author, I seek to prove that some of Barthes’ concepts, hitherto seen as inspired by structuralist ideas, appeared in his writings much earlier. An additional consideration is given to the use of metaphors that clearly links the 1946 and 1947 texts to the 1967 The Death of the Author.

In the mid-1950s, at the peak of psychosis, Tadeusz Peiper (the key figure in the history of Polish avant-garde) begins a gigantic manuscript-writing work, which takes the form of an all-encompassing logoreia called “Księga pamiętnikarza” [Book of Memoirist] by the author. In its present form, Book… includes dozens of folders of manuscripts and typescripts, in addition to which folders contain excerpts and newspaper clippings. By examining this – still unpublished, available only in the archive – manuscript, author of essay tries to tell the story of a creative subject at the same moment excluded from the social environment (understood as institutions, literary life, social relations) and producing a kind of phantomatic, delusional “environment” (to some extent detached from intersubjective reality).

Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s website (http://www.jptoussaint.com/) distinguishes itself from others due to several characteristic features. Notably, it houses an extensive collection of manuscripts while deliberately excluding any form of literary creation. This analysis focuses on Toussaint’s website within his representative work, Marie’s cycle (2002–2013). This cycle, written concurrently with other projects – such as Autoportrait a l’etranger (2000) and Made in China (2017) – exemplifies his autoreflexive tendencies. The website itself was established in 2009. Marie’s cycle not only exhibits narrative circularity through its textual framework but also underscores Toussaint’s meticulous attention to material and textual forms. Central to this exploration is the prioritization of reader mobility. Similar traits manifest in the structure and functionality of his website. Here, Toussaint embarks on a deliberate quest for digital forms specific to the Internet – an endeavor that resonates with his enduring preoccupation with form. The website employs formal devices intrinsic to the digital realm to perpetuate reading mobility. Moreover, Toussaint’s website serves as an exhibition, and its thematic coherence is centered around the creative process. As an author deeply captivated by backstage processes, he accords significant importance to the creative environment’s material and immaterial aspects.

The article deals with the creative process of creating a so-called walking performance. The analysed case study is the performance Skrót. Krakau Files [Short Cut. The Krakau Files, 2003] produced by Goethe-Institut in Kraków and created by the Swiss theatre director, Stefan Kaegi. The work on the performance is described from two perspectives. The first is internal (creative) – the author co-created the dramaturgy of the project and supervised its proper exploitation. The second is external (critical, exploratory, research-related). It includes references not only to existing theories of walking performance and audio walk but also to ideas such as flâneurism (as seen by Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin), psychogeography, the drift, the writings of Michel de Certeau, Guy Debord and the Situationists.