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The article focuses on the assumption that it is worth getting interested in sociologicalconcepts in the spirit of sociology of sociology. It happens that biographies of sociologicalconcepts themselves are interesting. Above all, however, they tell a lot on the more generalmechanisms, which construct the field of sociology-science.The basic part of the article focuses on unlucky concepts: (1) concepts which divergedfrom their original theoretical context, (2) concepts which started functioning as summariesof theories (at a loss for the concepts and summarized theories) and (3) concepts which havebeen promising as tools for analysis and description of the social world, but have neverbeen included in the dictionary of key sociological terms as they were “killed” by endlessdiscussions on their status and usefulness.The attempt to examine the history of (selected) unlucky concepts has two goals: first,recognizing mechanisms pushing sociology-science out of the field; second, identificationof some development barriers of contemporary sociology.
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The article analyses Max Weber’s position regarding the so-called Polish question fromthe point of view of post-colonial theory. The author discusses the circumstances of Weber’sscientific interest in the Polish question and offers an interpretation of his statements in thisregard. Then, she moves on to explore the relationship between this early inspiration and thesubsequent development of Weber’s comparative historical sociology, whereupon followsan outline of its post-colonial criticism. The article concludes with a suggestion of applyingthe author’s approach to studying the post-communist transformation and transitologicaldebates in Poland.
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The aim of the article is to trace the concept of the “iron cage of capitalism” attributedto one of fathers-founders of sociology, Max Weber. The author presents the origin of theconcept – a controversial decision of Talcott Parsons, a famous sociologist and the firsttranslator of Weber’s work The Ethics of Protestantism and the Spirit of Capitalism intoEnglish. Moreover, the presence of the “iron cage” in selected translations and originalworks in Polish and English is discussed.
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The article discusses the significance of the concept of ideology for social sciences.Although this concept was abandoned a long time ago in favour of the more “neutral” terms,due to Marxism and psychoanalysis it returned to social sciences in the second half of the20th century. In the article, I present the concept of Louis Althusser, whose perception ofideological phenomena shifts them from the field of studies on cognitive mistakes andmanipulation towards the socialization theory. I discuss shortly the psychoanalytical sourcesof this concept and point to the sociological tradition where similar concepts and problemscan be found. I use the empirical example to illustrate the consequences of Althusser’s theoryfor understanding ideology, and Slavoj Zizek’s theory to show the ways out of certain impasseof this theory. In the summary, the question returns on the importance of the concept ofideology for social sciences.
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In this article, I use Mieke Bal’ concept of wandering notions to analyse the conceptualapparatus that Zygmunt Bauman used in his works. In the first part of the text, I describe themost important features of his works which have connection with the practice of borrowingfor the needs of the sociological discourse of the terms coming from other contexts:transdisciplinarity, connections with literature and art, engaged character. Then, I present theexamples of the concepts of illustrative, propagation and foundation character which appearin his analyses. In the conclusion, I highlight the significance of categories redefined by himfor social sciences and humanities development.
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The paper undertakes the problem of a social circle notion “wandering”. The mainobjective is the description of this process and the extraction of its key fields. My mainargument is that as many of terms are borrowed from everyday language, its vaguenessmakes a social circle a notion differently interpreted in structural and interactionist perspectives,which constitute two main ways of its transfer. The analysis presents three transfers:from everyday life to cultural sciences theoretical framework; from low-operationalisednotion to an acute one from perspective of different sociological paradigms; from a metaphorof collectivity to an element of network theory.
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The cause to write an article was a question how to examine emotions which are ofspatial nature. While the colloquial language copes with “spatiality” of feelings – it knowsemotions and calls them (mood, atmosphere, climate, colour) – sociology has not developeda category enabling a systematic analysis of this phenomenon so far. In the theory of arts, thesituation is different. The leading subject of the text is reflection on possibility of combiningthe theory of art and sociology of emotions. The proposed link is to be the concept of imagetreated as “sensitizing concept” (Herbert Blumer). In the article, I refer to the concepts havingtheir roots in philosophy, social psychology and sociology of emotions which touch uponthe issue of spatiality of emotions and compare them to the concepts related to the theoryof image.
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The article discusses the issue of the return of the forgotten poets as a function of the literary paradigm subjected to changes at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. In the light of such a view, the crisis in the development of poetry would be one of the factors letting the forgotten poets’ voice be heard. Another one seems to be the alienation of late 19th-century authors seeking or involuntarily finding partners for a dialogue in tradition, not in contemporary times. The text raises the subject of the sacredness of the poetic word, referring it both to the socio-literary realities of the turn of the centuries and to the broadly defined tradition. In the paper, the author focuses on Cyprian Norwid (and his reader, Zenon Przesmycki) and Stefan George (for whom Stephane Mallarmé turns out to be an important poetic reference).
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In the Romantic period, death and resurrection belonged to the most important categoriesof artistic reflection. Norwid also explored the thanatic and resurrection topics, however hewas more interested in the aesthetic dimension than the theological aspect of returning frombeyond the grave, namely how the values of truth, goodness and beauty initially become thecause of the artist’s suffering to become later a guarantee of his immortality. From the firstemigration poem titled “Adam Krafft” till late works, the poet presented the fate of artistsand the works they created as the operative substance for testing the destruction and rebirthprinciple. Norwid believed that his work, which transcended the rigid confines and obsessionsof its own era, would resurrect in the future.
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Cyprian Norwid was considered by many researchers a poet of Polish Romanticism.The author of Vade-mecum was ahead of the times in which he lived, announcing andcontesting the upcoming modernité at the same time. The aim of the article is not, however,to sum up research conducted so far on the modernity of Norwid’s work, but to show why lateRomanticism is such an important category of description of the phenomenon of the authorof Vade-mecum and what links his works created in the 1860s and 1880s with the manifestosof the birth of new poetry at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.
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The article collects information on Norwid’s works found in recent years. The mostimportant discoveries include song lyrics [“Blade kwiaty na odłogu...”], two Norwid’s lettersto Julia Pusłowska and an original death certificate of the poet. As to the art works, unknowngraphics (6 pieces) and one watercolor of rare beauty (Pythia) were revealed at the auctions.Most of these works enriched the collection of the Museion Norwid Foundation. In theuniversity library in Illinois, a copy of Divine Comedy, given by the poet to NumaŁepkowski, was found. Another important item for Norwidology is a family photo albumbelonging to Maria de Bonneval née Gerlicz acquired for the collection of the Bloch FamilyFoundation, which included photos of over 70 people whom Norwid knew. The article alsoinforms about fakes and works whose authorship cannot be credibly attributed to Norwid.
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The article focuses on a lesser-known issue regarding the reception of Norwid’s work andat the same time it goes beyond the perspective of reception research and points to severalsignificant relationships between thought, aesthetics, literary sensitivity and intellectualbiography of both authors. The perspective assumed here is then partly comparative, andpartly reconstructing more or less obvious inspirations. Irzykowski rarely wrote about Norwidor referred to him (the issue of incomprehensibility is best known), while many of hisconcepts are worth confrontation with Norwid’s analogical ideas. Moreover, in many casesthe author of Quidam seems to be a silent adversary of Irzykowski, unnamed, but coreflectingin the margins of the text. Undoubtedly, both of them meet at key points as to theirunderstanding of tragedy, irony, and the “pałuba” [hag] element, which is one of the mostimportant concepts of Irzykowski, has its discursive counterparts in Norwid’s reflection.
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This paper focuses on the symbolic role attributed to Cyprian Norwid (1821–1883) inthe young poets’ and critics’ circle gathered around the right-wing conspiracy journal Artand Nation (1942–1944) in occupied Warsaw. They used a paraphrase of Norwid’s words,“The artist is the organizer of national imagination”, in order to emphasize their aim of anautonomous and at the same time nationally committed art. However, in many statementsby Andrzej Trzebiński (1922–1943) and Wacław Bojarski (1921–1943), the term “nation”appears to be more of a performative gesture than a reference to a consistent, historicallyevolving reality, as conceived of by Norwid. It was only in the 1944 essay “History and Deed”, never to be printed in the underground, that the circle’s foremost poet Tadeusz Gajcy (1922–1944) critically revisited anti-traditional activism and championed a genuinely “Norwidian”, contemplation-based understanding of creativity.
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The author argues that a role of Zenon Przesmycki in the process of bringing backCyprian Norwid to the Polish literary life is slightly overestimated. At the turn of the 19th andthe 20th centuries on the Polish lands, the reception of French symbolism took place, whichdetermined the perception of the author of Vade-mecum working in Paris (since 1849) asa great precursor of intellectual “visual poetry”. However, by making Norwid a strictlyRomantic poet, the generation of the Young Poland artists effectively distanced themselvesfrom artistic borrowings associated with Baudelaire, Verlaine, etc., thus obtaining the effectof the “nativeness” of modern Polish poetry at that time.
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The study is devoted to personological analysis of the one-hundred-poem collectionentitled Vade-mecum by Cyprian Norwid in the light of advanced and, above all, multidimensionalresearch on the personology of the subject of creative activities of EmilyDickinson’s poems. Based to a large extent on Robert Weisbuch’s complex terminology fromthe canonical volume Emily Dickinson’s Poetry, using his typology of lyrical personas, theresearcher on Norwid gains important, additional comparative literature tool allowing, e.g.the juxtaposition alongside each other of the types of poetry written by Norwid, Dickinsonand Baudelaire (Norwid’s and Dickinson’s lyrical persona is – it seems – a mixture ofa “wounded dialectician” and “engaging sufferer”, Baudelaire’s persona is, in turn, themarriage of features of an “engaging sufferer” and “withdrawn bard”). This is how the premodernist“theatre of personas” is created, the stronger that – which I am trying to emphasizein this text – despite appearances, it is possible to find similarities in the poetic languagebetween the works of Norwid and Dickinson. In the same way, Norwid and Dickinson – inorder to build their lyric – use a poetic function in the Jakobsonian sense: on the one hand,they strengthen and intensify its impact, on the other hand, they use it to “cover up” thephenomenon of linguistic disintegration of the world for which Modernist lyric poetryserved in a special way as a detector, a kind of litmus paper.
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The author proposes a reflection on discovering the poet with regard to his creationor construction. This issue is discussed on the example of Emily Dickinson’s works whichwere published only after her death and were not prepared for print by the author herself.In the light of the latest research on the material dimension of her legacy (starting fromVirginia Jackson’s study Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading from 2005 to therecently published collection The Gorgeous Nothings. Emily Dickinson’s Envelope Poems),it appears that many of Dickinson’s works were not written in a form that could be recognizedas poetic at first glance. A large part was preserved only in notebooks, loose sheets coveredwith handwriting written in continuo or at odd angles, in a manner adapted to the format ofa given scrap of paper, usually a free fragment of a recycled envelope or a torn-off cornerof a piece of paper used previously for a different purpose. These texts had to be recognizedthen by discoverers as poems, and then copied and edited in a way consistent with whatwas considered lyric poetry in the era. Some of them were then rejected as not falling intothe category of poetry and included in the opus of the American only by later researchers.Others, in the first editions treated as poems with time were excluded by historians ofliterature from this collection. Contrary to the provocative title, the aim of the article isnot to answer the question about the status of the texts left by Dickinson. Instead, the authorreflects on the poetic criteria ascribed to her works by the first and subsequent readers.
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