scholarly journals "Z życia zostaje co?..." Prof. dr hab. Algis Kalėda (2.10.1952 – 11.05.2017)

2018 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
pp. 288-296
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Kasner

“What remains of life?...”Prof. Dr hab. Algis Kalėda (2.10.1952 – 11.05.2017)This article is devoted to Professor Algis Kalėda, a renowned Lithuanian literary scholar, specialist in Polish literature and Lithuanian comparative literary studies, and a prominent translator of Polish literature. Over the years he worked at scholarly institutions in Lithuania (including the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore, Vilnius University Centre of Polish Studies, Vilnius Pedagogical Institute) and Poland (including Warsaw University, Jagiellonian University, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań). He collaborated with leading researchers from all over the world. Professor Kalėda left us the great legacy of his scholarly works and literary translations (from such authors as Czesław Miłosz, Wisława Szymborska and Stanisław Lem). The title of the article, “What remains of life?...”, is a quote from Czesław Miłosz’s poem “Notatnik: Bon nad Lemanem”, translated into English by George (György) Gömöri and Clive Wilmer: “From a notebook: Bon on Lake Geneva”, Poetry Nation Review 9, Vol. 6 No. 1, September–October 1979, https://www.pnreview.co.uk/cgi-bin/scribe?item_id=6270 Z życia zostaje co?...Prof. dr hab. Algis Kalėda (2.10.1952 – 11.05.2017)Artykuł został poświęcony pamięci Profesora Algisa Kalėdy – wybitnego litewskiego badacza: polonisty i lituanisty, komparatysty, tłumacza, w pierwszą rocznicę śmierci. Profesor Algis Kalėda przez długie lata był związany z litewskimi (m.in. wileńskim Instytutem Literatury Litewskiej i Folkloru, Centrum Polonistycznym Uniwersytetu Wileńskiego, Wileńskim Instytutem Pedagogicznym) i polskimi instytucjami naukowymi (Uniwersytetem Warszawskim i tamtejszą lituanistyką, Uniwersytetem Jagiellońskim, Uniwersytetem im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu). Współpracował z wybitnymi naukowcami z całego świata. Profesor Algis Kalėda pozostawił wybitną spuściznę badawczą oraz znakomite przekłady literatury polskiej na język litewski (m.in. Czesława Miłosza, Wisławy Szymborskiej, Stanisława Lema). Tytuł artykułu Z życia zostaje co?... jest cytatem z wiersza Czesława Miłosza Notatnik: Bon nad Lemanem (Brzegi Lemanu).

Author(s):  
Joanna Rzepa

This chapter offers a historical account of the presence of Paradise Lost in translation and Polish literature, especially how the poem’s reception in Poland has been shaped by complex modes of linguistic and cultural transfer. The chapter explores the historical and political contexts in which Paradise Lost was translated into Polish, discusses the most important actors involved in its publication, and analyses the strategies employed by the translators. It demonstrates that the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century translators of Milton, who worked at a time when Poland had lost its political sovereignty, focused specifically on the form of the poem, presenting models for a modern Polish epic poem that could help sustain Polish cultural identity. The focus of the twentieth-century translators, who lived through the world wars, shifted from the form to the rich imagery of Milton’s poem, in particular his exploration of the themes of vanity, destruction, and exile.


2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacob Edmond

Abstract Literary studies has taken a global turn through such institutional frameworks as global romanticism, global modernism, global anglophone, global postcolonial, global settler studies, world literature, and comparative literature. Though promising an escape from parochialism, nationalism, and Eurocentrism, this turn often looks suspiciously like another version of Anglo-European imperialism. This essay argues that, rather than continue the expansionary line of recent decades, global literary studies must allow other perspectives to draw into question its concepts, practices, and theories, including those associated with the terms literature, discipline, and comparison. As a settler colonial (Pākehā) scholar in Aotearoa New Zealand, I attend particularly to Māori literary scholars from Apirana Ngata, Te Kapunga Matemoana (Koro) Dewes, and Hirini Melbourne to Alice Te Punga Somerville, Tina Makereti, and Arini Loader. Their work highlights the limitedness of global literary studies in its current disciplinary guise. Disciplines remain important when they bring recognition to something previously marginalized, as in the battle to have Māori literature recognized within Pākehā institutions. What institutionalized modes of global literary studies need, however, is not discipline but indiscipline: a recognition of the limits of dominant disciplinary objects, frameworks, and practices, and an openness to other ways of seeing the world.


2021 ◽  
pp. 31-53
Author(s):  
Piotr Dobrowolski

The article opens with a statement that dramaturgical creativity, long marginalized by literary studies, has returned to the area of its interest together with its researchers’ use of the achievements of performative and cultural turns. Taking these into account allows us to treat drama as a distinctive literary practice in which the reception of a text is exemplary. As the author claims, with the New Humanities, integrating scattered reading perspectives known to the history of literary studies into the horizons of New Positivity, dramatic studies enrich this standpoint and maintain a critical view making creative use of the antagonism of perspectives, confrontation of attitudes, conflict of qualities or different visions and ideas. The potential tensions revealed in the practice of active reading of a literary text in accordance with the dramatic matrix guarantee the positive effects of each act of engaged reading. The dramatization of tradition is a specific field of critical dialogue between the reader and the existing literary tradition. Three dramatic works by Jan Czapliński are indicated as examples of mediators for this dialogue. The work of this playwright presents and suggests a critical reading of the characters and works of Gabriela Zapolska, Henryk Sienkiewicz and Adam Mickiewicz, leading to the emancipation of their works that is situated beyond the framework of the discursively created, existing canon of contemporary Polish literature and culture. A critical view enriches and updates the canon. Dramatization, which allows the revaluation of existing values, appears as the basic category of contemporary art – revealing existing, usually ineffable conflicts and using them to build new, positive values.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (16) ◽  
pp. 43-66
Author(s):  
Alexandra Berlina

The present article studies Shklovsky’s idea of emotional and cognitive renewal of the habitual – ostranenie – alongside cognate concepts in psychology and cognitive studies. It redefines ostranenie not as a device (as commonly accepted in literary studies), but as a cognitive/psychological effect, and suggests the term “extratextual ostranenie” to refer to the feeling one has when the usual becomes seemingly strange – and at the same time more rather than less emotionally relevant.  As for literary ostranenie, even when it is created though characters who feel alienated or depersonalized, the readers’ experience is exactly the opposite experience – emotional reconnection to the world.


Knygotyra ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 74 ◽  
pp. 35-95
Author(s):  
Sondra Rankelienė

In this article, the latest data about the personal book collection items of King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania Sigismund II Augustus in Vilnius University (VU) Library are presented. The authors that have been doing research on these books have not ascertained all of the embossed images that were used for cover decoration and have not identified the locations of where these books were bound and have not disclosed all of the provenances. In order to amend the lack of knowledge about the books of Sigismund II Augustus in VU library, the book covers of the King’s personal library were reviewed de visu and decorative ornaments were described. The ownership signs of the books were registered once again. While describing and comparing these books with the copies in various libraries of the world, the number of physical books (14) and publications in composite volumes (21) kept in VU library was assessed. The name of one book and a publisher’s imprint of two books were specified, eight provenances that were not mentioned by previous authors were registered. While describing book covers, the embossed images were given provisory names. Connections between the supralibros, dates of binding, decorative wheels, single embossed images, and other decorative elements were detected and lead to a reasonable conclusion that eight out of fourteen books from the Sigismund II Augustus collection were bound in Kraków, five were bound by bookbinders in Vilnius, while one was rebound in the 18th century. The identification of tools used by craftsmen that worked in Kraków and Vilnius will allow to ascertain the manufacturing location of similar book covers made in the middle of the 16th century.


Author(s):  
Dariusz Śnieżko

The topic of the article is an analysis of the positions of today’s interpretations of the old Polish literature. Firstly, the position of the interpreter was examinated in the context of the methodological map of medieval, Renaisssance and Baroque studies in Poland. Secondly, it is about the chronological location of the interpreter, generally beyond the horizon of medieval and early modern authors’ expectations toward future readers, that was limited by the eschatological perspective (near the end of the world). The issues of empathic references and affective reactions have also been raised, which are considered here as a stimulating experience of “recognizing continuity” between the ancient and present epochs. At last, the article presents the justification for the interpretative practice that could be called “the poetology of insight” – in reference to the remarks by Roland Barthes and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht.


Author(s):  
Tokimasa Sekiguchi

The major works by Bruno Schulz and Witold Gombrowicz were translated into Japanese in the 1960s, mainly by Yukio Kudō. I was enchanted by those Japanese texts to such an extent that I decided to abandon French literature and switch to Polish contemporary literature. In 1974, I came to Poland on a post-graduate fellowship of the Polish government, and I began studies in literature and the Polish language at the Jagiellonian University. During that two-year stay in Krakow, my view of Polish literature changed several times. The phase well established in the Japanese translations I had known ended quickly. Then I began to “hunt” for promising Polish authors not yet present in world literature. I thus discovered the prolific, esoteric and difficult Teodor Parnicki (1908–1988). This essay is my description of my “penetrating” the world of the Polish language at that time.


2019 ◽  
pp. 83-94
Author(s):  
Jarosław Ławski

The subject matter of the present article is the image of library and librarian in a forgotten short story by a Polish-Russian writer Józef Julian Sękowski (1800−1858). Sękowski is known in Polish literature as a multi-talented orientalist and polyglot, who changed his national identity in 1832 and began to write only in Russian. In the history of Russian literature he is famous for Library for Reading and Fantastic Voyages of Baron Brambeus, an ironic-grotesque work, which was precursory in Russian prose. Until 1832 Sękowski was, however, a Polish writer. His last significant work was An Audience with Lucypher published in a Polish magazine Bałamut Petersburski (Petersburgian Philanderer) in 1832 and immediately translated into Russian by Sękowski himself under the title Bolszoj wychod u Satany (1833). The library and librarian presented by the author in this piece are a caricature illustration proving his nihilistic worldview. Sękowski is a master of irony and grotesquery, yet the world he creates is deprived of freedom and justice and a book in this world is merely a threat to absolute power.


2021 ◽  
pp. 20-46
Author(s):  
Thom Dancer

This chapter argues that modesty offers an alternative, legitimate model of critical engagement with a world defined by limited human agency and perpetual crisis in which we are irrevocably implicated. This argument is situated in the context of the profound changes in worldview entailed by what I call “Anthropocene thinking.” With this phrase, I signal a departure from solely environmental approaches to the Anthropocene, instead focusing on how the era unsettles conventional habits of aesthetic expression and critical inquiry. The second section offers a defence of “modesty” as opposed to other possible key terms (such as humility or generosity) by showing how critical modesty has a precursor in the style of William James’s pragmatism. The chapter offers a reading of literary and narrative form in the writing of Bruno Latour. Despite Latour’s growing popularity in literary studies, critics have tended to overlook the crucial function of form, style, and technique in his writing. Attending to Latour’s writing at a more granular level illustrates how a work can be formally modest about its position with respect to what it studies while also being critical, insofar as any redescription offers a contrasting account of the world. The chapter’s literary approach allows that the Latourian style of inquiry and novelistic discourse are up to the same kind of thing: attempting to make sharable a process of thinking that opens up conversation about the composition of our world.


2020 ◽  
pp. 300-307
Author(s):  
Karim Mattar

In the Conclusion, I consider the wider implications of the book. Addressing the question of whether spectrality – and by extension (Derridean) theory per se – has a future in literary studies given the “postcritical” turn that scholars such as Rita Felski have recently called for, I suggest that it indeed does. This book, I affirm, is nothing if not a contribution to and expansion of the project of critique for the world literature debate. Through its reading of the Middle Eastern novel as metonym and metaphor of such, it will have sought to reorient world literature around the paradigmatic critical figure of the specter. Moving forwards, our task and indeed responsibility is one of expanding this analysis to the world in endless critique.


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