W poszukiwaniu istoty rzeczy. Studia i portrety

Abstract

The author of the present study is Head of the Research Unit in Interwar and Contemporary Literature at the University of Białystok. His academic interests include the history of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Polish literature, with a particular focus on epic works, Christian themes and regionalism. His recent book, In Search of Essence, seeks to confirm the decline of postmodernism understood as a decisive factor in diagnosing the globalized culture. A peculiar liaison between the late Leftist Marxism and selected aspects of Christianity may result, as the author argues, in the development of such a mode of literary criticism that can help the reader see again a structural entirety and a significance of a given literary text. In the context of the research praxis, this is tantamount to posing fundamental questions about the presence of one subject in all the works of a given author, about constitutive traits of a given oeuvre, about ways in which all the subject matters that seem crucial to our being-in-the-world are present in literature. The author draws upon the aforementioned theoretical possibilities. In Part I, “People,” he looks for the most significant moments in the lives and works of the writers such as Czesław Miłosz and Julian Tuwim, analyses the Christian dimension of Roman Brandstaetter’s writings, and locates Wojciech Wencel in the tradition of Polish national(ist) poetry. In Part III, “Locus,” he attempts to thoroughly examine the works of the artists associated with Podlasie: Sokrat Janowicz, the major representative of Polish Belarusian literature; Wiesław Szymański, a journalist and writer dedicated to literary life of the region; and Elżbieta Kozłowska-Świątkowska, a poet and publisher. While Part I and Part III introduce major Polish national and regional authors, Part II, “Themes,” comprises four thematically different texts. Two of them relate to WW II, the catastrophe that still shapes the way people in Poland live and define themselves. The author focuses on Polish prose dedicated to the Holocaust, analyzing it through the prism of “emotion” as a dominant theoretical category, and considers representations of the human body in concentration camp literature. The remaining two texts revolve around faith and religion. First, the author considers spectacular careers of certain Catholic writers in the Polish People’s Republic, and then he goes on to trace religious elements in Polish (Sapkowski, Dukaj, Piekara) and foreign (Tolkien, Ursula K. Le Guin, Terry Pratchett) literature of fantasy. After all, so the conclusion is, in every conceivable world it is faith that provides answers to fundamental questions of our existence.