Komentarze do Rozmowy "Wielogłosu"

 The article tries to answer the question concerning the causes and reasons why we deal with literature at all and it also tries to defi ne the status of literary studies themselves (including Polish studies); at the same time, the author of the article argues that literary studies as an autonomous discipline of knowledge, possessing its own, separate language and isolated, precisely defi ned subject-matter of research, does not really exist. He points out to the relativity and arbitrariness of the boundaries marking out the division of the total area of human knowledge into individual disciplines, and draws attention to the institutional division of the university into subject areas, faculties or departments. According to the author, the real goal of Polish studies should be the “shaping of human sensitivity and imagination”, “renewing existence through broadening the space of our own life” and constructing refreshing cognitive fictions that allow us to understand the world and ourselves anew.

The article constitutes a part of a larger project devoted to a new assessment of the epistemological and institutional aspect of the sciences of man. In the first part, the author takes up the issue of criticism of a certain version of the concept of crisis (a kind of preliminary assessment, carried out from the position of psychoanalytical criticism of culture). In the second part, the author puts forward a hypothesis concerning the necessity to defend the speculative potential (tradition and the future) and subjects to a critical evaluation the existential and hermeneutic interpretation of “self-understanding” as a principle of the functioning of the humanities. In the third part, the author takes up the issue of the emancipating potential of humanities, juxtaposing the “work of reflection” with the language of axiology and instrumental reason.

Sister Bridget Costello reads Baudrillard

The article constitutes an attempt to refl ect on the present condition and potential future of Polish studies (and the future of university humanistic studies in general) as seen through a simultaneous reading of the fi fth chapter of John Maxwell Coetzee’s book Elizabeth Costello, entitled Humanities in Africa and two short essays by a French philosopher and sociologist Jean Baudrillard, taken from his book Simulacra and Simulations. The main focus of attention is the threat of de-professionalization of humanistic studies associated with the uncontrolled multiplication of new critical languages, the disappearance of ideological and competence arguments and an uncritical cult of radical inventiveness which is not accompanied by an accumulation of knowledge.

 The borderlands, peripheries, little motherlands – it is on such concepts that the discourse on multiculturalism – one of the most powerful discourses in Polish literature of the last two decades, is being built. Its inner dynamic shows the tension between opening oneself up to the Other One, and the impossibility of crossing the borderline that separates us from him. As a result of it, multiculturalism becomes transformed into yet another community myth of the Poles – this time, a myth serving to become adjusted to the European cultural standards. A positive intention, visible in sympathetic narrations about the Other One, is confronted with helplessness caused by one’s own limitations. The cultural project becomes confronted with Reality. Our multiculturalism remains a Polish perspective which attempts but vainly to rid itself of its own limitations. Yet in the Polish literature of recent years, one can fi nd authors who go one step further (Stasiuk, Tkaczyszyn-Dycki) and who try to listen to the voice of the genuine Other One, who is to be found outside the borders of the all-appropriating myth of Polish multiculturalism.

The author presents the context in which the ethical turn has taken place and provides examples of traditions in criticism which exerted an infl uence on ethial criticism, putting emphasis on Wayne C. Booth’s book The Rhetoric of Fiction. The author quotes the most important concepts which form the basis of ethical criticism as well as its main principles – the link between a literary work and the outlook of its author, the shaping of a bond between a literary work and the reader in the process of reading, the subjective nature of each reading of a literary work and the consequences that follow this fact. Schwarz suggests distinguishing the ethics while reading (analysis of the moral consequences that follow reading a literary work) from the ethics of reading and presents five different phases of an ethical reading of a literary work.

The article attempts to defend ethical criticism against opponents who consider that textual analysis cannot take into consideration ethical issues, and makes an effort to prove that not all ways of speaking about ethics and literature have anything to do with ethical criticism. In spite of different approaches to the issue of ethical criticism, the existence of the “ethical power of art” is undeniable. Although the above fact is quite obvious and universally recognized, literature scholars in most cases do not wish to deal with this aspect of literature. As different genres and different types of literary texts incite to the formulation of ethical judgments, arguments and contentions concerning ethical issues may only be solved by critical pluralism.

Review

Martha C. Nussbaum, W trosce o człowieczeństwo. Klasyczna obrona reformy kształcenia ogólnego, przeł. A. Męczkowska, Wrocław 2008.

Moje zdziwienia /My Marvellings/ is a column run by Henryk Markiewicz, retired Professor of the Jagiellonian University and one of the most outstanding Polish literary historians and theoreticians. In his essays, Professor Markiewicz presents and discusses various literary theory publications, comments on current events at the academia, argues with and questions authors of scholarly and popular articles, all the time being indefatigable in his insistence on respecting standards of academic professionalism, competence, honesty and responsibility for judgments and opinions expressed.