Reffering to the Life and Work of Roman Ingarden ((Review of the collective monograph “Philosophy of Roman Ingarden and the Modernity”. Ed. by Dm. Shevchuk. Ostroh: Publishing House of the National University “Ostroh Academy”, 2021).

The content and main issues of the collective monograph “Philosophy of Roman Ingarden and Modernity” edited by Dmytro Shevchuk, issued on materials of the International Conference, which took place in Lutsk at the National University “Ostroh Academy”. In this monograph covered the views and fundamental problems of the famous Polish philosopher in the field of ontology, epistemology, anthropology, axiology, philosophy of literature. We can assume that the authors of the monograph managed to achieve the goal: outlined the significance of R. Ingarden’s achievement for modern philosophy, compared with the views of representatives of the Lviv-Warsaw School, phenomenology, semiotics, philosophy of dialogue and others. The relevance and prospects of the study of R. Ingarden’s works in Ukraine are noted.

Content and Form

A remarkable demonstration of the contempt literary theory has had for content appears in the various reference dictionaries of literary terms. Almost invariably, they offer lengthy definitions of form, while usually failing to include an entry at all for content. Yet all the while, the term “content” recurs throughout other definitions, a hidden but necessary component of explaining the various methods of making sense of literary texts. A more nuanced account of the form-content distinction, one that draws on both the analytic philosophy of literature and the sophisticated scholarship on allegory in literary theory, explains how form can be a tool for the expression of literary content.

What Is the Torah?

This chapter develops a traditional riddle concerning the relationship between the “Heavenly Torah” and the “Earthly Torah.” First it is established that the Jewish tradition is heavily committed to the existence of a Heavenly Torah, and that contemporary philosophy of literature provides us with no reason to demur. How are the Heavenly and Earthly Torah related? This chapter sketches all the possibilities, and shows how each answer comes at a cost. This is the internal problem with the revelation.

Introduction

Although literature and logic share a number of surprising symmetries and historical contacts, they have typically been seen to occupy separate disciplinary spheres. Declaring a subfield in literary studies — logic and literature — this introduction outlines various connections between literary formalism and formal logic. It surveys historical interactions and reciprocal influences between literary and logical writers from antiquity through the twentieth century, and it examines how literary theory and criticism have been institutionally shadowed by a logical unconscious, from the New Criticism and (post)structuralism to recent debates about historicism and formalism. It further considers how the subfield of logic and literature, in its constitutive attention to form, is neatly positioned to cut across these debates, and it sketches ways of reading at the interface of aesthetics, philosophy of literature, and literary studies that might be energized by an appeal to logical contexts, ideas, and methods.

On Bruno Schulz’s Demythologization of Reality

The Polish version of the article was published in Roczniki Humanistyczne vol. 62, issue 1 (2014). This article is an attempt at an analysis of the changes occurring in the area of Schulz’s narrative identity that is being constituted. It is assumed that the turning point for Schulz’s personal myth was first of all the success of The Street of Crocodiles and a number of events in his personal life (splitting up with his fiancée, his brother’s death, his health problems). Each of these factors starts to influence, in its own way, the writer’s questioning of the possibility to continue writing, that is, interpreting the world, discovering history, “making reality sensible.” The success of The Street of Crocodiles becomes a challenge that is difficult to respond to in these new conditions. The writer’s “brilliant epoch,” the epoch of “writing for himself,” comes to an end. The “Schulz” issue is in danger of sinking into oblivion. The narrative space is gradually transformed into a space of coping with alienation, division, loneliness. These motifs are articulated in a special way in the stories Dodo, The Pensioner, and Loneliness. If, in these stories, overcoming failure in life is indeed impossible (Dodo) or proceeds owing to “sponging off somebody [else]’s life” (The Pensioner), or “parasitizing metaphors” (Loneliness), in The Homeland the rewriting of an individual myth ab origine takes place. The act of this “rewriting” is understood as consequently departing from the basic principles of Schulz’s literary hermeneutics and philosophy of literature. The reality appearing as a result of this departure is a reality that is not rooted in genuine experience, a quasi-reality of “negative values,” a reality of a narrative disaster signaling the definitive “death of Bruno the Great.”