Norwid, Coarse and Transcendental: The Case of Intertextuality in “A Dorio ad Phrygium” Cover Image

Norwid rubaszno-transcendentalny. Głos w sprawie intertekstualności „A Dorio ad Phrygium”
Norwid, Coarse and Transcendental: The Case of Intertextuality in “A Dorio ad Phrygium”

Author(s): Karol Samsel
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Studies of Literature, Comparative Study of Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu w Białymstoku
Keywords: intertextuality; bawdiness; transcendence; modernism; Cyprian Norwid

Summary/Abstract: The article revises the existing critical discussion concerning the intertextuality of Cyprian Norwid’s poem “A Dorio ad Phrygium”. The author of the article demonstrates that the piece can be interpreted both from the perspective of the old-Polish intertextuality (his hypothesis concerns Norwid’s inspirational address “from Kochanowski to Rej”) as well as through “self-scrutinizing gestures” of the poet himself, who uses the intertext to refer to his own poetry. By reading the equivocal initial part of the poem, the author traces Norwid’s intertextual affinity with Rabelais, Whitman or Rubens and points to the bawdy and transcendental nature of the work. These tropes explain the earlier radical readings of the poem by Wiesław Rzońca (deconstruction) or Krzysztof Cieślik (anthropology of Ruth Benedict or Clifford Geertz). While keeping these considerations in mind, the author of the article maintains, above all, the inter-textual perspective. The final part of the article juxtaposes the depiction of Serionice from “A Dorio ad Phrygium” with the Dublin of Ulysses and asserts that in both the topography is characteristically multidimensional (early modernist period) and relativistic (late modernist period) in its socio-cultural representation.

  • Issue Year: 2020
  • Issue No: 16
  • Page Range: 213-226
  • Page Count: 14
  • Language: Polish