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This article discusses Gombrowicz’s place in Polish and world literature. It seems that “Polish form” facilitated his attaining the rank of a world writer for being an artist of his kind, communicating ideas and values beyond the local. However, the issue of Gombrowicz is that Gombrowiczians quickly reached a barrier and found themselves in crisis already in the beginning phase of Gombrowicz studies in 1976. Their main weakness then is the language they use which seems to be the very language of Gombrowicz himself. And what can be done about it?
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Literature has been made of words, but also – of literature itself, by use of references to existing works and paradigms. Sometimes – just as in Gombrowicz’s case – this is what allows for originality. By referring to remarkably diversified range of literary works, traditions and paradigms, Gombrowicz evokes his subjects of interest and builds unique reality. In my essay on one of his novels I referred to this phenomenon as 'constructive parody'. Its subjects may vary from artworks such as Shakespeare's plays or the great poetry of Polish Romantics, to works in popular culture. In this respect, Gombrowicz resembles Igor Strawinski, who placed great importance on references and parodies his works consist of
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The article is a discussion of Witold Gombrowicz's comments on structuralism. The author analyzes the rhetorical strategies of the writer used in the interview I Was the First Structuralist. He also considers the possibility of interpreting Gombrowicz's texts using structural tools.
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The paper focuses on Witold Gombrowicz’s interpretation of the postcolonial discourse that was taking shape during his years in Argentina. In the Diary he unmasked the ideological foundations of this discourse. On the one hand, he criticized the very simplistic application by some of its participants of the doctrine of communism, which tends to attribute all evil in the world to Western capitalism, particularly practised by the United States, while on the other hand he voiced objections to the Latin American nativism and nationalism, both engendered, in his view, by an inferiority complex. An emphasis on the body language as an interpretational tool in defining the nature of the Latin American identity is a particularly valuable insight on Gombrowicz’s part. Ultimately, he opposed the essence-oriented approach to the question of national character and suggested instead an interpersonalist and activist view which, despite traditional forms and stereotypes, emphasizes the need for continual personal and socially oriented self-recreation.
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The aim of this article is to show the complicated attitude of Witold Gombrowicz towards religion. The writer declared himself an atheist, but numerous fragments of his Diary prove that the strong beliefs about his own disbelief were weakened in many ways. The most important for this issue are two records – from 1956, when the writer read Simone Weil, and then spent the lonely Christmas Eve in Mar del Plata, and from 1958, when he describes a walk up Calvario Hill in Tandil. The author refers to the post-secular manifesto by Jürgen Habermas from 2001, in which the philosopher revised the one-dimensional, Post-Enlightenment secularization theory and proves that Gombrowicz had already done it in his own way some decades before.
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An analysis of Gombrowicz’s attitude towards science shows that it is based on an oxymoron: science does not lead to real knowledge about the world, but “muddles” and “reduces”. Gombrowicz was very much aware of the opposition between art and science, yet he was not prepared to accept the early modernist idea of “art for art’s sake”. He perceived in this concept the same striving for “economy, purity, quintessence” that had led science astray, alienating it from reality. Especially dangerous was the demand of “objectivity”. Paradoxically this scientific postulate had been accepted by modernist art as its own “internal value”. According to Gombrowicz art should not follow the lead of science, but shake off its fetters. The author should not attempt to hide his inner self, but expose it to its utmost. Here we are confronted with a fresh paradox. Gombrowicz’s hostility to science seems, from the point of the development of social science, a misunderstanding. It could even be argued that several areas of contemporary scientific humanities were created by him. Of course, these areas are not (in Gombrowicz’s case) the objects of ordinary scientific research. They are acts of “Witold Gombrowicz”, apprehending himself.
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The article presents the mask of Gombrowicz as a “street Bourdieuian”. The two thinkers are seen as “contemporary” in their corresponding ideas in this excerpt from Jean-Pierre Salgas’s book Gombrowicz structuraliste de la rue (2011). Three moments showing how Gombrowicz understands Bourdieu while Bourdieu explains Gombrowicz are discussed. Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke is read as the origin of sociology of literature in Poland, his Diary – as a practice of sociology “in weightlessness”, and his Against Poets – as a manifest against the literary (art) religion, an anti-Heideggerian act of anti-fascination.
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The article offers 12 readings of Gombrowicz’s last novel, Kosmos, his most complicated and mysterious one. Witold and Fuks, two students from Warsaw, run away up in the mountains from their conflicts with surroundings. There they try to solve a puzzle with a hanged sparrow, doing this in various ways: they stage a detective inquiry (Fuks investigates the trail of the Perpetrator-God, Witold, in accordance with the host, Leon, finds out that the hanging has erotic, if not homosexual, implications) while the signal of sexual tension is the partition of man into ectodermic layer and endodermic evagination. This cognitive drama exists in Gombrowicz in the language and against the cosmic accumulation of elements, with which the author composes his story, leading to unfulfilled crime and black mess.
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The article presents Gombrowicz as a szlachcic (a well-known home image) in contrast to aristocrat (a mirror image of the self). Hence, the paper discusses the Polish szlachta’s (gentry) mythology which constituted Gombrowicz’s relations with his home and the world, Poland and Europe. His Sarmatism needs to be more European than it used to be. Chivalry – and more specifically the ideal of the gentleman – is the common denominator of Gombrowicz’s style, composition and imagery. Błoński further compares Gombrowicz with Thomas Mann and Neitzsche to build his argument of the mask of Gombrowicz, the Polish nobleman.
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The following paper is an excerpt from Klementyna Suchanow’s two-volume biography Gombrowicz. "Ja, geniusz" (2017). It discusses Gombrowicz’s difficulties to get published.
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The main objective of this text is to track the critical reception of Bruno Schulz’s and Witold Gombrowicz's literary debuts in Polish interwar literary periodicals, as well as the various strategies, used by both writers to defend their own writing and artistic visions from critical readings based on ideological preconceptions.
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This article is the first to study more thoroughly and comparatively Nabokov and Gombrowicz. Nevertheless, the focus is put on Gombrowicz, his writing and ideas in the context of Nabokov’s oeuvre. Some psychological, sociological, and philosophical views from the XX c. as well as game theory serve as basis for the observations. In addition, this text in the issue marks Nabokov’s 120th birthday anniversary.
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This excerpt from Lost in the Shadow of the Word (Space, Time, and Freedom in Interwar Eastern Europe) (Northwestern University Press, 2016) addresses the structure of doubling in Witold Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke, with special emphasis on the role of shame in both the construction and disintegration of one's sense of self. In Paloff's reading, Gombrowicz exposes shame – whether in the presence of others or in moments of isolation, when one constitutes the Other by imagining his relentless gaze – as the painful awareness of Being, an awareness that the double makes physically manifest.
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The problem of reality seems to be central in Gombrowicz's last novel Cosmos (1965). The described reality is modeled upon the work of the abundant and the excessive. This gives ground to see some parallels with a work published exactly a hundred years before Cosmos – Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). How does Gombrowicz illustrate Lewis Carroll's "much of a muchness" and what is the role of the teapot? Reality, "obsessive by its very essence," grows and swells beyond endurance, demonstrating how “the last drop [...] makes the cup overflow”. Nevertheless, it remains always partial, fragmented, fractional, fractal. Can then metafiction be pictured by a fractal and could we read Cosmos as Gombrowicz’s theory and practice of metafiction? Towards a theory of metafiction as an excess of reality the following paper presents Gombrowicz as the first theoretician of metafiction.
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The paper discusses literary forms of extension and transformation of the space of art works in the selected texts by Jakub Kornhauser. In the first mode, the spatial system of the painting is integrated with the real space, which is immediate to the subject, allowing the conceptualization of the subject’s experience. In the second mode the subject presents either a continuation or the story that precedes the plot featured in the work of art. The story narrated is subjected to the realities of the visual paradigm. It completes what remains unseen in the painting. The author asserts that it is this way of representing space that may determine the apocryphal component in the ekphrastic text.
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The article discusses the relationships with places formed by two writers: Adam Mickiewicz and a forgotten Philomath from the region of Podlasie – Michał Rukiewicz. The author uses the methodologies developed within geopoetics and humanist geography to discover how the biography is related to a specific physical place and to demonstrate how the two writers shaped their geobiographies. Rukiewicz left his mark on the places with activism within local communities; Mickiewicz textualized them in artistic gesture. The Philomath from Podlasie was happy to give himself to his nation but the Lithuanian poet spoke more through emotion and faith.
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The article discusses the problem of relations between spatial issues and contemporary identity discourses. Using such concepts as homo geographicus (R.D. Sack and J. Kaczmarek) and homo localis (M. Madurowicz), it presents a special case in which the subjectivity is determined in relation to the specific geographical environment – the mountains. The term “mountain man”, used in the literature, media and colloquial language for more than a hundred years, was analyzed from a philosophical perspective by Antonina Sebesta in the work Etyka i ethos “ludzi gór” (Ethics and Ethos of “Mountain People”). However the definition and scope of this identity category remains undetermined. This article “puts to test” the concept of the “mountain man” by analyzing the works of the so-called “mountain literature” of Michał Jagiełło – literary critic, mountaineer and rescue team member. The interpretations of the poems concentrate on the role of spatial metaphors in the lyrical identity narrative. The author notes how Jagiełło’s works, especially his last book of poetry – Pusta drabina [The Empty Ladder] encourage reflection on identity and the mythology of the “mountain man”.
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The article discusses the anthology ...czterdzieści i cztery. Figury literackie. Nowy kanon (Warsaw 2016) dedicated to the literary figures of women who contributed to the formation of collective imagination. One of the great assets of the reviewed volume published by Women Archive at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences is the modern methodology. The research tools from such fields as feminist critique, gender and queer studies as well as postcolonial criticism do not obliterate historical context of the analyzed works but they offer the opportunities for fresh readings of literary figures and the previously neglected literary space. Consequently, the discussed anthology succeeds in redefining Polish literary canon.
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