Jakub Momro
Criticism: Between eros and recognition (essay)
Expanding on the comments of Terry Eagleton ("The function of criticism"), the author recognizes literary criticism as a movement of the mind, which is based not only on subversive distrust towards any figurative individualistic form, but also on applying certain personalized sanctions to such a process. In the meantime, critical strategies of the past (Przemyslaw Czaplinski's concept of "moving margins" and the program of "committed literature") reject the category of criticism as a literary field where an individual can save his own fortuitousness and search for a way of self-emancipation.

For literature can allow for the creation of such a critical medium in which the economical and the hierarchical model of communication gives way to a rational defence of individuality and to the criticism stemming from the consciousness of the one who is reading. From a critical perspective, only the intellect, the desire to communicate and to save one's own name can protect us from total escapism and total commitment, guard us against opportunism and the irrational faith in the necessity of continuing an ideological war through literature.


Krzysztof Unilowski
Autonomy reclaimed: Stanislaw Brzozowski and "Krytyka Polityczna" (essay)
Published since 2002, the periodical "Krytyka Polityczna" refers to the ethos of the Polish intelligentsia and the attitude towards societal involvement describing them as the elements of the leftist tradition. It stands behind the idea of "committed literature" and regards the autonomy of the arts as a bourgeois bias. At the same time, the magazine faces the dilemma of independence from the media market and mass communication. As its patron it took one of the most prominent Polish critics and modern philosophers, Stanislaw Brzozowski, who in turn considered artistic autonomy as a necessary condition for literature's social impact.

Recent comments by Stanislaw Sierakowski, the editor-in-chief of Krytyka Polityczna, reveal that the issue is not whether a work of art presents an idea of social involvement, but whether the art in question changes the established opinion of literature as a separate, individual sphere of social communications.

Contrary to what Krytyka Polityczna claimed earlier, it is impossible to relinquish autonomy altogether. Instead, it is essential to confirm such autonomy through a critical attitude towards the socially accepted literary norms. The book Paw królowej (Queen's Peacock) by Dorota Maslowska (2005) allowed Sierakowski to see that the issue of autonomy and independence in literature cannot be ignored, but needs to be revised and re-examined.


Justyna Baran
Poetry "badly done". On Grzegorz Olszanski's "Film chronicles" (essay)
The most recent volume of Grzegorz Olszanski's "Film Chronicles", allows us to consider the Hölderlin's formula regarding poetry as "the most innocent of all occupations" but "the most dangerous of possessions" from a new perspective.

The poems, entangled in a cinematographic context, have an unclear status, oscillating between a game, or a provocation, and an inter-textual experiment, in which all attempts at interpretation will lead unequivocally to an absurd. The dissimilarity of the styles: poetic and cinematographic, ambiguous status of the words, complicated relationship between text and reality, balancing between a game and existence, all create a climate and conditions for the presentation of total helplessness of words. Helplessness with regard both to references as well as epistemology, disconnection from the meaning, entanglement not with reality, but with the actions leading to its recognition. The use of film nomenclature as a tool for the interpretation of these works allows us to glimpse in them the intention to bare the weakness of the intellectually stacked language.


Grzegorz Tomicki
Was supposed to be. About personal relations in literary communication and Krzysztof Sliwka's poetry (essay)
Tomicki addresses a problem of personal narration in literary communication and presents the work of Krzysztof Sliwka as a typical example of autobiographical poetry ("writing life"), with an assumption that the poet in his role has a function similar to one that characterizes everyday normal functioning of society. As such he is not only the lyrical subject, but rather a Jung-type character, which comprises one aspect of his personality as as "authentic" and "real" as any other. His works document the development of this personality, full of contradictions and conflicting desires, goals and ambitions, where the guise of comedy and persiflage hides a real human drama of existing-in-the-world.

Published 2008-10-29