The article presents the way in which Józef Wereszczyński (born after 1531, died 1598), a Benedictine abbot from Sieciechów, used, in his work Gościniec pewny niepomiernym moczygębom a omierzłym wydmifuklom świata tego do prawdziwego obaczenia a zbytków) swych pohamowania z Pisma świętego i z rozmaitych autorów zebrany i wydany (1585), one of the sermons of a Jesuit Jakub Wujek (1541–1597), which the latter included in Postylla katoliczna “the greater” (1573–1575; 1584). The focus was on the marginalia – those summarizing the matter and footnotes. It was pointed out that Wereszczyński, besides adopting fragments of a sermon Na tenże dzień Jana świętegokazanie drugie przeciw opilstwu a obżartswu świata dzisiejszego, subjected the marginalia to amplification, substitution and abbreviation practices. Although himself not free from negligence, he also corrected the biblical addresses wrongly identified in Wujek’s Postylla.

In Old Polish literature, literary criticism was virtually unknown. In view of the scarcity of appraisals and reviews, a rhyming review written by a second-rate poet from the second half of the 17th century Seweryn Bączalski has extraordinary weight. In a poem Do tego, co już przeczetł, which crowns his 1608 collection of poems Przestrach śmiertelny, Bączalski evaluates the works of several poets from Cracow of that time, taking this opportunity to comment in great detail on Hieronim Morsztyn’s popular poem Światowa Rozkosz, published in 1606. The reviewer was riveted by an apparent clash: throughout the poem, Morsztyn enumerates multitudinous delights, only to unexpectedly deprecate in the ending their value when confronted with death and decay. This discrepancy hardly motivated in the poem and still attracting researchers’ attention, Bączalski motivates by a biographical key presenting Morsztyn as an inveterate womanizer who, finally, ends up ensnared by… syphilis. This experience allegedly changed the poet’s attitude towards carnal pleasures, and Światowa Rozkosz gave this existential discovery of his literary form. 

Both analysed satires, the one from the mid-17th century and the other written one hundred years later, are connected by a relationship of “incompatible compatibility”; after all, their authors presented as reprehensible what they saw differently: whereas Opaliński criticized lower gentry and upper gentry, Naruszewicz criticised only the latter. The most general meaning of both texts is as follows: the idea of nobility and its social practice are usually divergent, and therefore, opposing. Both satirists can be regarded as republicans, yet, this ideological bond is undermined by the radicalism of the descendant of an aristocratic family and moderate democratism of the Pińsk master of the hunt.

Common conceptions of the Enlightenment and the Romanticism lead to a hypothesis that the Romantics should stand in opposition to such archaic remnants of chivalric epic as duels. However, in Słowacki’s correspondence with his family upon his arrival to Paris, we see accounts of “continuous duels”, extremely popular with our immigrants. Dandism, along with duels, is the second main topic of his letters, which supports the claim that Słowacki was not a litigious person, light-heartedly challenging to a duel Mickiewicz or Krasiński, depending on which of the two great men of his time offended him more. Occasionally, a less distinguished person, a journalist (Ropelewski) was designated to represent either of the poets.
Słowacki the dandy, relates duels in his correspondence and strictly literary texts. Luckily to himself, his seconds in duels adopted the attitude of priest Marek from the drama Ksiądz Marek, and not the attitude of the second from a digressional poem about Beniowski. Słowacki himself as a second, at least in the duel between Józef Zienkowicz and Adam Kołyska, leaned towards the first attitude.

The article depicts relations between two distinguished Polish literary critics from the interwar period – Kazimierz Wyka and Ludwik Fryde. They both represented the same literary generation (the 1910 generation) and the same programmepostulating critical model. Despite shared interests, among them responses to the same literary events (especially Maria Dąbrowska’s Noce i dnie) and shared issues of literary generations, their relationship was usually described as a dispute. Wyka and Fryde adopted a different stance on the critical and social impact of Stanisław Brzozowski and the significance of work of Wyka’s master Stefan Kołaczkowski. Their world view also differed. Although both critics were among the first proponents and promoters of personalism in Poland, Wyka was closer to Emmanuel Mounier’s way of thinking, whereas Fryde was closer to Jacques Maritain’s.

The aim of the paper was the analysis of the scientific disputes published in ”Pamiętnik Literacki” in the “Dyskusje – Korespondencja” section, and previously ”Polemika”, ”Dyskusje i Polemiki”, and ”Korespondencja”, from 1902 till 2008. The author of the paper has formulated the idea of the peripheral frame which describes the type of argumentation of a peripheral character which, nonetheless, introduces essential arguments into a discussion. While analysing the disputes published in ”Pamiętnik Literacki” the author of the paper has observed some repeated elements of the refutation frame which have a peripheral character, surrounding the subject and modulating the statement’s persuasion-ability. The frame elements can also be found in the sphere of inventive, thematic and disposable topos related to the composition limits. Among their most important mutual points (loci communes) there are: concern of the reader argumentation like ad auditores), meta-polemic remarks, adminicula, or, in other words, reference to a dispute circumstances, causa scribendi, or refutation reasons, an opponent’s evaluation, or a group of arguments ad hominem.

An interview with Sylwia Chutnik, a Polish contemporary writer.

Prose by Sylwia Chutnik, Polish contemporary writer.

Brak.

The subject of the following review is an over 250-page book by Dariusz Dybek entitled Anioł w piśmiennictwie polskim XVII i XVIII wieku (2012). Devoted to one subject and providing a thorough analysis of the subject matter, it can be regarded as a monograph, and in particular, a problem monograph since it is “an in-depth and source study”, as Henryk Markiewicz puts it. However, Dariusz Dybek’s assumption of the equal status of the Baroque and the Enlightenment angelofanic works and angelology is disputable because the Enlightenment sources have to be described as overwhelmingly Saxon (waving aside the division into “Saxon half century” and “Stanislavian half century” is unacceptable from the historic and literary perspective). The values of Dariusz Dybek’s book can be appreciated by way of comparison of his work with an earlier study by Danuta Künstler-Langner Anioł w poezji baroku. Dzieje postaci w kulturze dawnej Europy (2007).

In the wake of spacial turn, we are currently observing in literature a growing interest in space, of which geopoetics is one aspect. The book Geopoetyka. Związki literatury i środowiska by Anna Kronenberg was submitted as her doctoral dissertation at the Department of Theory of Literature, Institute of Contemporary Culture at the University of Łódź. The author is known for her interest in geopoetics,  ecocriticism, ecofeminism and Polish immigration literature. The reviewer of Kronenberg’s work focuses on the geopoetical value of the young researcher from Łódź. She is praised for the metaphorical character of her study and her involvement reaching far beyond the academia. On the other hand however, it is pointed out that she is unable to develop Kenneth White’s thought in the scientific discourse, as compared with Elżbieta Rybicka who does so on assumption so to speak.

The author analyses Andrzej Dobrowolski’s exquisite edition of letters of the editor of Kultura Jerzy Giedroyc and Teodor Parnicki written between 1946 and 1968. This volume of their prolific correspondence reveals a lot of previously unknown facts from the biography of the author of Słowo i ciało and the life of immigrants at the time of the Polish People’s Republic, and shows problems Parnicki had publishing his novels in the Instytut Wydawniczy PAX.

The subject of the following review is the 2014 edition of collected articles and addresses of Philipe Lacoue-Labarthe entitled Typografie. A point of reference for his uniquely understood politicality and community (audience) is provided by the theses of a Czech philospher Jan Patočka. The following article emphasizes cohesion of Lacoue-Labarthe’s thought as seen in the volume in which the French philosopher discusses various texts in humanities, including literary, philosophical and musical. Typografie is presented as a significant voice in the ongoing debate about contemporary man.

At the very beginning of his review, the author indicates that Notatnik i modlitewnik drogowy by Henryk Waniek is a remarkably eccentric piece of writing (in accordance with the etymology of this word as located outside centres), placing itself outside dominant discourses and modes. In Waniek’s book artistic competence and talents merge as it also contains some prints by the author. Despite the absolute originality of the title, it has been taken from a certain semantic field of meanings close to Waniek and well known to him from his Silesian peregrinations. Therefore, it can be said that the nomadic prose of this publication is part of the geopoetic trend (the author sees Silesia, sees a road, sees space for its own sake), yet it also remains characteristic of Waniek’s writing in being esoteric, esseistic, reminiscent and metaliterary.

Although lacking elements of the poetics of drama, Magdalena Tulli’s prose draws extensively from the traditional Medieval morality play. The key figure here is allegory, which is often used in accordance with the convention of the morality play. This connection is referred to by the author of the following essay as the modality of the morality play, assuming the understanding of the category of modality after Włodzimierz Bolecki. In Tulli’s prose it manifests itself in that the plot is set beyond historic time and usually beyond specified space; the boundaries of the world are ultimately set by the distances between actors and props.

Tulli’s writing refers the reader to universal issues present nunc et semper. She readily uses the concept of en ronde scene as a sole place of action (for instance the municipal square in Skaza). Before the eyes of a viewer – reader, she develops a plot told by allegoric characters; she does not give up moralizing but avoids exaggerated didacticism. The morality mode in Tulli’s writing is realized through the philosophical thesis of constantly emphasized inevitability of wander from birth to death. 

Report from the scientific conference 'Teksty zalecające w książce dawnej i współczesnej' (Katowice 2014).

The writings of Sylwia Chutnik are mainly interpreted from the two perspectives: gender and urban (Warsaw). These two perspectives are intertwined in her novels, starting from her very first Kieszonkowy atlas kobiet and continuing till her most recent collection of short stories W krainie czarów, thus giving her prose specific, seditious, and emergency character. This article attempts at firstly, showing Chutnik’s writing as a creative (and increasingly interesting, vide Cwaniary) way of developing fundamental beliefs and
problems, narrative and plot structure devices, and literary patterns already used (if only in embryonic form) in the four stories of her first book. Secondly, the article attempts at presenting the literary intertextual background of this prose – exceptionally rich, conscious and… effective.

In Kieszonkowy atlas kobiet (2008), the first novel by Sylwia Chutnik (born in 1979), all protagonists bear traits of uncanniness. Her female characters reside between life and death, real life and nightmare, day and night, the acceptable and the (socially) forbidden. They are also bordering on madness. These motives, however, are presented by the author as comic, and what is more, in a manner resembling the game of cognitive perspectives in Romantic literature. Like a Romantic ballad-writer, the author’s narrator either enters the imaginary world vouching for its reality, or she undermines it, discreetly suggesting the fictional and literary nature of a story. The Romantic aesthetics has not, however, been revised by Chutnik, but used similarly to Umberto Eco’s notion of intertextual irony. Chutnik emphasizes her distance toward employed conventions (if only because of their historic character). As a result, she creates an ironic variation of the identity novel, which proves only partial identification of Chutnik’s writings with the prevailing narrative models. However indispensable these models are, their validity is totally arguable.