António Feijó i Leopold Staff – poetyckie wizje Orientu na tle polsko-portugalskich relacji literackich i kulturalnych (od parnasizmu do palimpsestu)

The article aims to discuss the Chinese culture inspirations in Polish and Portuguese modernist poetry. In the context of Polish-Portuguese literary relationships, late Romantic, Symbolic, Parnassianism-related and Oriental tendencies are presented in the works of a Portuguese poet Antón Feijó (1859–1917), with references to a selected aspect of Leopold Staff’s works (1878–1957). A historical-literary analysis is accompanied by literary and cultural comparative studies. Within the comparative method of presenting the Parnassian palimpsests, as 'The Chinese Lyric Book' ('Cancioneiro Chinês', 1890) by António Feijó and 'Chinese Flute' ('Fletnia chińska', 1922) by Leopold Staff are categorised, the thesis about the independent status of the works in question was built. Modernist visions of the Orient, understood to date a paraphrase or an adaptation of Chinese poetry read in translations from French, gain the status of original works. In view of blurring the differences between the European adaptations – Portuguese poem and Polish poetic prose, based on Oriental motifs drawn from two different French sources (translations): Judith Gautier’s and Franz Touissant’s works – and the Chinese original, the methodological approach to the text as to a palimpsest is justified. Feijó’s “Chinese Poetry” and Oriental poetic landscapes in Staff’s prose are therefore independent literary works, analysed in parallel, as mirror reflections of the fascination with the Orient’s culture. The literary works in question fully deserve the title of cultural texts, the recipient of which will be a Polish reader, a lover of poetry inspired by French Parnassianism.

A Transcription of Dumont D'Urville's Manuscript les Zélandais Histoire Australienne and the Accompanying Notes, Followed by a Study of Some Literary and Historical Aspects of the Text

<p>A brief encounter with the Maori people during April 1824, inspired Dumont d'Urville to write a novel set in New Zealand. This work is the first novel set in New Zealand and the first fictional treatment of the Maori people, written by someone who had had first hand experience of their country. Les Zélandais Histoire Australienne is a unique combination of fact and fiction and as such has a considerable contribution to make to the history and literature of the Pacific region and of New Zealand in particular. The work was never published and the reasons for this are discussed in the final chapter of the thesis. After an interval of more than one hundred and sixty years spent in obscurity, Les Zélandais Histoire Australienne emerges from this study as a valuable historical and literary document. We have described it as an ethnographic novel with ethno-historical notes. The work is comprised of two sections of equal size and importance. There is the novel and the accompanying notes which cover a wide range of subjects, reflecting Dumont d'Urville's wide ranging interests, including Pacific history, geography, languages and cultures. The Notes are a primary source of information, containing Dumont d'Urville's observations which reappeared in later publications. In addition, the vivid experiences of Burns the stowaway and ex-convict, are invaluable as early eye-witness accounts. This is the first complete transcription of the manuscripts. It was a major undertaking because of the length, age and condition of the manuscripts and the almost illegible handwriting. The exercise is discussed in Chapter I In the literary study, several writers admired by Dumont d'Urville, or by whom he was influenced, are discussed. In the first paragraph of the Story, Dumont d'Urville mentions in particular Fénelon, Florian and Rousseau. We have examined some aspects of their work which are relevant to Les Zélandais Histoire Australienne. There is, for example, a discussion on the opposing view points held by Rousseau and some of the French explorers with regard to the legend of the Noble Savage. In addition, we have chosen two works, Paul et Virginie by Bernardin de Saint Pierre and Atala by Chateaubriand, in order to consider Les Zélandais Histoire Australienne from the point of view of exoticism and poetic prose in French literature. This section concludes with an appreciation of the literary style of the novel, which contrasts with the style of Dumont d'Urville's later popular work, Voyage pittoresque autour du monde. The navigator had an abiding interest in the peoples of the South Pacific. Through les Zélandais Histoire Australienne, Dumont d'Urville communicates the enthusiasm with which he made his contribution to the study of mankind. Others before him had recorded ethnographic information but Dumont d'Urville's concern for the cultural predicament of the Maori people sets this explorer apart. The author of this work is a pioneer in modern anthropology.</p>

A Transcription of Dumont D'Urville's Manuscript les Zélandais Histoire Australienne and the Accompanying Notes, Followed by a Study of Some Literary and Historical Aspects of the Text

<p>A brief encounter with the Maori people during April 1824, inspired Dumont d'Urville to write a novel set in New Zealand. This work is the first novel set in New Zealand and the first fictional treatment of the Maori people, written by someone who had had first hand experience of their country. Les Zélandais Histoire Australienne is a unique combination of fact and fiction and as such has a considerable contribution to make to the history and literature of the Pacific region and of New Zealand in particular. The work was never published and the reasons for this are discussed in the final chapter of the thesis. After an interval of more than one hundred and sixty years spent in obscurity, Les Zélandais Histoire Australienne emerges from this study as a valuable historical and literary document. We have described it as an ethnographic novel with ethno-historical notes. The work is comprised of two sections of equal size and importance. There is the novel and the accompanying notes which cover a wide range of subjects, reflecting Dumont d'Urville's wide ranging interests, including Pacific history, geography, languages and cultures. The Notes are a primary source of information, containing Dumont d'Urville's observations which reappeared in later publications. In addition, the vivid experiences of Burns the stowaway and ex-convict, are invaluable as early eye-witness accounts. This is the first complete transcription of the manuscripts. It was a major undertaking because of the length, age and condition of the manuscripts and the almost illegible handwriting. The exercise is discussed in Chapter I In the literary study, several writers admired by Dumont d'Urville, or by whom he was influenced, are discussed. In the first paragraph of the Story, Dumont d'Urville mentions in particular Fénelon, Florian and Rousseau. We have examined some aspects of their work which are relevant to Les Zélandais Histoire Australienne. There is, for example, a discussion on the opposing view points held by Rousseau and some of the French explorers with regard to the legend of the Noble Savage. In addition, we have chosen two works, Paul et Virginie by Bernardin de Saint Pierre and Atala by Chateaubriand, in order to consider Les Zélandais Histoire Australienne from the point of view of exoticism and poetic prose in French literature. This section concludes with an appreciation of the literary style of the novel, which contrasts with the style of Dumont d'Urville's later popular work, Voyage pittoresque autour du monde. The navigator had an abiding interest in the peoples of the South Pacific. Through les Zélandais Histoire Australienne, Dumont d'Urville communicates the enthusiasm with which he made his contribution to the study of mankind. Others before him had recorded ethnographic information but Dumont d'Urville's concern for the cultural predicament of the Maori people sets this explorer apart. The author of this work is a pioneer in modern anthropology.</p>

FORMS IN MOTION: THE POETIC PROSE OF ROBERT MACFARLANE AND KATHLEEN JAMIE

This essay examines the use of poetic prose in recent non-fiction by Robert Macfarlane and Kathleen Jamie. Drawing on selected chapters from Macfarlane’s The Old Ways (2012), Jamie’s Sightlines (2012), and a prose poem from Jamie’s The Bonniest Companie (2015), it demonstrates the hybridity of contemporary nature writing by paying attention to the works’ transgressions of the bounds of verse and prose. After introducing the nineteenth-century debate on differences between lyric and prosaic language and outlining Romantic efforts to poeticize prose descriptions of nature and environment, the article discusses Macfarlane’s and Jamie’s role in this conversation. I argue that formal transgressions – evident in metrical and rhyming effects, typographical experiments, imagery, and allusion – are especially strong in passages that describe movement: in accounts of walking or in observations of the shifting motions of light and weather. Prose forms that approximate and integrate lyricism here enhance a sense of transience as well as exhibit the continuity of human and non-human worlds. Self-consciously tracing the footsteps of other poets who have traversed genre boundaries, Macfarlane’s and Jamie’s work establishes nature writing as a form that is persistently on the move.

Virginia Woolf and Poetry

Virginia Woolf’s career was shaped by her impression of the conflict between poetry and the novel, a conflict she often figured as one between masculine and feminine, old and new, bound and free. In large part for feminist reasons, Woolf promoted the triumph of the novel over poetry, even as she adapted some of poetry’s techniques for the novel in order to portray the inner life. Woolf considered poetry the rival form to the novel. A monograph on Woolf’s sense of generic rivalry thus offers a thorough reinterpretation of the motivations and aims of her canonical work. Drawing on unpublished archival material and little-known publications, the book combines biography, book history, formal analysis, genetic criticism, source study, and feminist literary history. Woolf’s attitude toward poetry is framed within contexts of wide scholarly interest: the decline of the lyric poem, the rise of the novel, the gendered associations with these two genres, elegy in prose and verse, and the history of English Studies. Written in clear and lively language, the book maintains a narrative drive as it traces Woolf’s reading and writing over her lifetime, including her response to poets and critics in her circle such as J. K. Stephen, Julian Bell, Vita Sackville-West, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, T. S. Eliot, Stephen Spender, and W. H. Auden. Virginia Woolf and Poetry makes three important contributions. It clarifies a major prompt for Woolf’s poetic prose. It exposes the generic rivalry that was creatively generative to many modernist writers. And it details how holding an ideology of a genre can shape literary debates and aesthetics.

Jacques Réda's ‘Le Noir et l'or de Dresde’: Ethics and Aesthetics in War's Wake

In ‘Le Noir et l'or de Dresde’ ( Europes, 2005), Jacques Réda's quixotic project is to excavate a Dresden that is no more. Fully aware of this paradoxical aim as he walks through its martyred cityscape ‘vers la Dresde du XVIIIe siècle en sachant qu'elle n'existait plus’, he reflects on images present and past: sun-drenched spires remembered from eighteenth-century paintings that stand as witness to what no longer exists, the brutal bombings by American and British forces during the Second World War, and the commercialized aftermath of German reunification. As Réda moves beyond assessing tragedy through a historical lens, his poetic prose commemorates trauma by accentuating chromatic, lexical and aural textures and intensities in order to open avenues towards shared subjectivity. He establishes an ethical and aesthetic trajectory that responds creatively to war's destruction, and concludes by reframing the city's heraldic colours, black and gold, within sunset's unifying transit across a poetically reconstructed skyline

Horizons of memory: childhood memoriesas an experience of figurative comprehension of timein the philosophy of Walter Benjamin

The article outlines Walter Benjamin’s philosophical theory of time, which formed the ba­sis of his conception of history. It is a famous alternative to a number of existing models. Benjamin’s approach to understanding time is characterized by a unique methodology. It is based on artistic images and not on abstract categories and linear patterns of a philosophi­cal and historical discourse. On the one hand, such images allow Benjamin to capture the characteristic properties of a concrete time, which are often difficult for historical sci­ence to grasp, and on the other hand, they make a strong impression on the reader because they require an emotional involvement in the text. The book “Berlin childhood around 1900”, often attributed to the genre of a poetic prose, is a visual representation of Ben­jamin’s philosophical ideas. The fragmentary style of narration and its metaphorical nature are intended to demonstrate a different way of experiencing the present moment – when the signs of the future clearly appear in the fragments of the past. The fusion of all three temporal modes in an instant he calls “Jetztzeit” (just now), which is difficult to articulate in the language of rational metaphysics, is embodied in the allegories of “Berlin child­hood”. Selected fragments of this work are analyzed in the present paper. They capture each of the three time dimensions in the current “now” mode: the fragment “The otter” symbolizes the past, “Loggias” symbolizes the future and “The sock” symbolizes the present. Childhood memories, which do not usually appear in philosophical reflec­tions, serve as a source of the birth of images: on the one hand, they supply sensual mate­rial from personal experience, on the other hand, they suggest a synthesizing principle, be­cause a child is more sensitive to the unity of fiction and reality. Benjamin’s “memorial letter”, seen from this angle, turns out to be a strategy to think poetically about the world, time, and history.

History in Contemporary Lithuanian Literature

The purpose of this article is to show the evolution of the historical novel that began in the era of independence, to highlight the peculiarities of male and female historical narratives, and to capture critical reactions and tendencies of assessment of that kind of novel. At the beginning of independence, the poetic prose of a minimal story was established in Lithuanian literature, which was created by the most prominent Lithuanian prose writers, and the historical novel made its debut as a complex experience of poetic narration. Poetry and prose focused on archetypal narratives, national consciousness and ethnic semantics and were characterized by an abundance of associations, but not by a clear storyline. Among common variations of the male historical novel, we can observe historical novels written by women, which have won both literary awards and readers’ approval.

Bruno Schulz – Hidden and Obvious – in Yuri Andrukhovych’s Texts (on the example of the poetic Cinnamon project)

The article investigates connections between the poetic prose of Bruno Schulz and the poetic Cinnamon cycle of Yuri Andrukhovych, a contemporary writer and poet, implemented by the au-thor in 2008–2011 as a musical and poetical project in conjunction with the musical „Karbido” band (Wroclaw). It is a lyrical and epic cycle consisting of ten parts: two essays from the book, My Europe (2001, co-authored with Andrzej Stasiuk) and selected poems from Andrukhovych’s poetic collection, Exotic Birds and Plants (translated into Polish by Jacek Podsiadło, 2007). The cycle has a secondary origin: it is a poetic integrity that arose as a result of the intentionally outlined-by--the-poet search for those texts (written before) in his own oeuvre, which built a new, regenerated integrity Bruno Schulz became a pretext and foundation for. Schulz is not present in the cycle directly, obviously – he is hidden there, metonymic and signifi ed by Andrukhovych (according to the termi-nology of Roland Barthes where the signifi ed is secret, deep and needs to be searched). By creating Cinnamon, Andrukhovych is reborn from the author-creator to the author-reader/author-interpreter so the original author’s intention-birth becomes an intention-search which is also used by the author of the given article while reading Schulz’s poetic codes encrypted in the texts of the cycle.

Prose Poetry and the Very Short Form

This chapter discusses the relationship between prose poetry and very short literary forms, which are proliferating online and in print. While novels, short stories, lineated lyric poems, and dramatic works have been at the center of literary practice for centuries, contemporary writers are reinvigorating the understanding of genre and form — and some of their writing does not sit comfortably within conventional literary classifications. To an extent, this is true of prose poetry in general, and it is certainly true of hybrid works that contain, reframe, or transform prose poetry. This is not to suggest that all hybrid prose-poetical works are products of the late twentieth or early twenty-first century. There are many early examples of hybrid works that make use of poetic prose. However, many contemporary hybrid works that make use of very short prose forms are especially notable for their emphasis on an irredeemable sense of fracture, and such works are increasingly being accepted as central to the literary world. This recent growth in the popularity and esteem of very short literary forms provides a new and positive context for understanding prose poetry and its scholarship.