Oświeceni latarni się nie boją. Szkic polemiczny
The Enlightened Are Not Afraid of Lighthouses. A Polemic Sketch

Summary/Abstract: The author of this article enters into polemics with Grzegorz Zając's theses as laid out in the article “`The Enlightened Do Not Need To Be Enlightened…' Reflections on School, the Seriousness of Reading and the Madness of Ideology” (Roczniki Humanistyczne vol. 67 (2019), no. 1, p. 25-38). The polemics concerns the alleged ideological bias and reductionism of literary interpretation and the instrumentalisation of literature that is said to be carried out by contemporary postmodern literary criticism due to the vulnerability of this same criticism to ideologisation. While Zając opts for a “prelapsarian” return to reading literature as art for its aesthetic qualities, this paper seeks a remedy in a more realistic and less prejudiced “postlapsarian” perspective instead, one calling for a confrontation with the landscape “after the fall” of literary criticism. In this confrontation, which is meant to invite discussion of the values underlying the current approaches in literary studies, a vital role can be played by the neo-Aristotelian “Tradition”, juxtaposed by Alasdair MacIntyre in his seminal book Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry with the modernist “Encyclopaedia” and the postmodern “Genealogy.”

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