Ruch Literacki

Whereas Ingarden’s studies on the strata of the literary work of art have attracted considerable critical attention, it is not the case with the other building-block of his theory, the concept of the literary work’s temporal phases. It was ignored by the French structuralists and the American pragmatists, and, more recently, by neuroscience, although the latter is founded on insights that are similar to Ingarden’s. A comparison of the two approaches shows that his concept of temporality remains as relevant as ever. It is an analytical tool of remarkable precision that can be used to examine schemas of understanding conditioned by the sequential nature of language, especially in case complex schemas elicited by utterances with many themes and hardly any temporal or causal links. Ingarden’s analyses shed light on the analogically-functioning memory mechanisms that generate cognitive schemas responsible for the integration of the experienced objects. Drawing on Edmund Husserl, Henri Bergson and philosophers of the Lvov-Warsaw School, Ingarden assigned the key role in that process to foreshortening and the retention-protention mechanism. After identifying these sources of inspiration it is possible to suggest an alternative solution to the problem of the cognitive value of neuroscience narrative protocols and to situate current developments in narratology in a broader conceptual framework.

The article explores the problem of literary pictorialism, i.e. literary representation of the visual arts, with respect to the term hypotyposis. It appears to have sunk in oblivion, although it can boast of no less respectable origin as ekphrasis, and is by no means synonymous with the latter. In this article the precise meaning of hypotyposis is made out by means of comparisons with terms like trompe-l’oeil, anamorphosis, mise-en-abîme, and palimpsest. On the whole, hypotyposis does not describe a work of art but constitutes its verbal variant, or a structural and thematic equivalent in which the plot brings forth animated allegory of the image. We should distinguish, the article argues, two types of hypotyposis, the mimetic and the diegetic. The mimetic hypotyposis animates the content (the what) of the work of art, i.e. what is presented, or, in other words, the components of the fi ctional world. The diegetic hypotyposis dynamizes the manner (the how) of the presentation, i.e. it activates the manner in which the fi ctional world is constituted and the philosophical or formal problems raised by the work’s representation. Finally, the article examines the differences between hypotyposis and the generally accepted meaning of ekphrasis.

This article examines two forms of 19th-century animal magnetism. The fi rst had its roots in early 19th-century Romanticism, the other fl ourished on the fringe of orthodox science and medicine in the last decades of the century. Common to both is a confl ation of scientifi c experimentation, hermetic thought and popular culture. Mesmerism represented a peculiar, excitingly unorthodox face of 19th-century modernity. Now largely discredited and forgotten, it fed on the contemporary enthusiasm for scientifi c discoveries and confi dence in the human ability to do virtually anything. What distinguished mesmerism from other vitalist theories was its claim to shift the boundary between physics and metaphysics.

Published in 1904, Jolanta: A Dramatic Poet in One Act by Edward Leszczynski is – like Atlantyda, one of his later dramas – a celebration of love, vitality, and life. Both works are saturated with the symbolic profusion of the Pre-Raphaelites. In Jolanta the glowing spiritual and symbols, inspired by the paintings of William Holman Hunt, are used to communicate the horror of a solar apocalypse punctuating a deadlocked argument. An eschatological reading of the drama, proposed in this article, puts its apocalyptic ending in a new perspective.

The article examines the rise of the postmodern Holocaust narrative in Polish literature taking as a case in point Leopold Buczkowski’s novel Pierwsza świetność (First Glory), published 1966, in the context of the musings of Edmond Jabés and the testimonial writings of Halina Birenbaum. In this study the postmodernization of the Holocaust is treated as an alternative to the traditional genre of the Holocaust testimonial. Contrary to the broadly-held view that the postmodern Holocaust narrative is a fairly recent phenomenon, the article claims that it made its appearance some time after the war, in the mid-1960s. Its emergence can be seen as an attempt to voice the aporias and doubts that resulted from the pressure to draw a line on the wartime experiences and move on. Many writers, including Leopold Buczkowski, were convinced that it was necessary to keep alive the memory of the Holocaust by encrusting the historic record with other plots, problems and metaphors. This article is the fi rst in a series of studies of this problem in the 1970s and the following decades of the 20th and the 21st century.

This article attempts to throw some light on what may be called Poland’s new national-identity literature and its leading fi gures, Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz, Wojciech Wencel and Przemysław Dakowicz. They see their work as a psychopolitical educational tool in the service of a patriotic mission to reactivate the ‘real’ national identity. They believe that such an identity is necessary for individuals to develop strong personal identities, founded on a sense of belonging to an integral national community. Rymkiewicz, Wencel and Dakowicz champion this, somewhat archaic, model of national identity which claims total commitment from its members in virtually all their writings. This article focuses on the rhetorical devices used by the new national-identity literature to present and promote its key concept, especially the idea of a ‘sublime’ ethnic community, or a sentimentalized vision of a Polish Commonwealth.