{"id":8,"date":"2017-11-04T19:13:13","date_gmt":"2017-11-04T18:13:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wiekteorii.strony.uw.edu.pl\/?page_id=8"},"modified":"2020-10-19T15:08:53","modified_gmt":"2020-10-19T13:08:53","slug":"o-projekcie","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/wiekteorii.uw.edu.pl\/en\/","title":{"rendered":"About project"},"content":{"rendered":"ABOUT THE PROJECT<\/p>\n

Because all the time, whether we admit it or not, <\/span><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

we are reigned by those who lived before us. Where there is no memory, <\/span><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

not only the time but also the space is a wasteland.<\/span><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

(Czes\u0142aw Mi\u0142osz, 1965)<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

PRINCIPIA<\/span><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The name of the discipline we adopted is not \u201cliterary theory\u201d, but <\/span>theoretical literary studies. <\/span><\/li>\n
  2. By<\/span> \u201cmodern\u201d<\/span>we mean critical (reflexive) literary studies which orient themselves towards not only the academic and artistic, but also social and political reality. <\/span><\/li>\n
  3. <\/a> Modern Polish theoretical literary studies <\/span>are an emergent whole composed of textual and extratextual sources created in the last century.<\/span><\/li>\n
  4. <\/a> The scope of Polish theoretical literary studies is defined by the<\/span> cultural concept of identity.<\/span><\/li>\n
  5. Topographically, Polish theoretical literary studies belong to a <\/span>neighbouring community<\/span> of Central and Eastern European literary studies.<\/span><\/li>\n
  6. The space of Central and Eastern Europe <\/span>is, from the point of view of the field, a place where <\/span>global<\/span> modern literary studies were born. <\/span><\/li>\n
  7. Modern Polish literary studies are at once <\/span>local<\/span> (the \u2018here\u2019 perspective), <\/span>regional<\/span> (the neighbourhood perspective) and <\/span>global<\/span> (the universal perspective). <\/span><\/li>\n
  8. Like the other neighbouring literary studies, they are focused on certain cultural topics. <\/span><\/li>\n
  9. What is unique about the Polish studies is that they treat the topics as \u201cin-between\u201d, placing them on the crossing of different traditions of thought and disciplinary approaches. <\/span><\/li>\n
  10. Modern Polish literary studies are examined from a close, <\/span>philological<\/span> perspective (in the timeline of three consecutive Avant-garde movements) and from a distant, <\/span>long-thought <\/span>perspective (in its spatial aspect), without introducing methodological arrangements. <\/span><\/li>\n
  11. This approach adopts the concept of <\/span>entangled history, <\/span>intertwining textual and extratextual events, as well as the principles of <\/span> agnotology <\/span>and <\/span>prosopography.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    PROJECT DESCRIPTION<\/span><\/p>\n

    <\/a> The project has three closely related, mutually determined research aims and heads for proving three hypotheses critical towards those accepted so far. The aims as well as the hypotheses deal with <\/span>\/1\/ <\/span>historical, <\/span>\/2\/ <\/span>theoretical and <\/span>\/3\/ <\/span>methodological subject matters.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

    The main hypothesis, with the support of a vast corpus of text, assumes to create a non-arbitrary redefinition of the discipline traditionally called literary theory. That redefinition shall be based on thorough elaboration of the domain\u2019s past and actual condition in the period of a hundred years from its founding (assuming we accept the year 1913, when Shklovsky\u2019s founding brochure <\/span>The Resurrection of the Word<\/span><\/i><\/span><\/span> was published, as the inauguration date of the domain; in Polish humanities it is a date marked by the crucial studies by Kazimierz W\u00f3ycicki, Wac\u0142aw Borowy and Zygmunt \u0141empicki, as well as important political, artistic and scientific events throughout Europe). The perspective of the century gives a good opportunity to revalue fundamental issues related to the culture of Polish modernism (its geopolitics and geopoetics) linked to the fact, which is unprecedented in the history of European scientific culture, of constituting a new research domain in the region of Central and Eastern Europe. In its birth and development, the Polish literary theory played a pivotal role, comparable with the well known role of Russian, Czech and Slovak theory. That role was not only limited to the academic aspect; Polish literary theory, as any other field of cultural studies in the 20th century, created a space of discourse and actions engaged in the social and political issues. Some of its basic notions and terms, including those crucial like \u201cpoetic function\u201d, \u201caesthetic value\u201d (Ulicka 2012), and \u201clyrical subject\u201d (P\u0142achecki 2012) functioned as cryptonyms. Those terms, due to migration and emigration of scholars, entered the global literary theory glossary, losing their discursive character and the weight of the experience encrypted in them (Bal 2002), became anonymous and acquired a status of operative devices. The commonly accepted thesis claims that their weariness, together with the change of geopolitical situation and civilization transformations lead to the degradation of literary culture in favour of media culture, which resulted in the effeteness of theory itself and the theoretical regime, finally giving place to the cultural studies regime (Tihanov 2004).<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

    That thesis is grounded in a narrow definition of theory, related to the early modernist concepts which were elaborated on basis of a limited (and successively duplicated in uncritically repeated remarks) text corpus, which consists mainly of manifestos and methodological declarations, not confronted with the research practice. Apart from that, sometimes, other texts (polemical or didactical) are treated as methodological manifestos only on grounds of title. The redefinition will be aimed at proving: <\/span>\/1\/ <\/span>the uniqueness of theoretical writing as a new genre in Polish scientific modernist culture, <\/span>\/2\/ <\/span>its culture-oriented character and impetus, dating back to early modernism, <\/span>\/3\/ <\/span>its century-long regulative, exemplar-setting and term-productive role for other Polish cultural studies domains (theatrology, film theory, anthropology, art and architecture theory, typography) and – due to the unity of cognitive and ideological issues – for some disciplines of social science (ethnology, social psychology, sociology, historiography, law, politology). Literary theory provided them with conceptual frames and analytical devices, in the same time it took over terminological choices and concepts from other domains, within the humanities and arts themselves.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

    The justification of the redefinition described above requires: <\/span>\/1\/ <\/span>a change of the text corpus compared to that considered for the last fifty years as representing literary theory due to the process of projecting methodology of literary research onto theory and substituting the first one for the other; <\/span>\/2\/ <\/span>taking into account the substantial aspects of the material collected on basis of extra-methodological criteria, which means: \/a\/ its thematic, stylistic, genological and terminological character and discursive uniqueness compared to other linguistic and non-linguistic scientific, artistic and socio-ideological practices, \/b\/ combining the material with the scholars\u2019 biographical experience and choices, reflected in the subject matters they undertook, ways of their interpretation and linguistic elaboration; \/c\/ relating those discursive exponents to the thinkers\u2019 institutional affiliation and informal relations, and \/d\/ their international cooperation. Theoretical literary studies, seen in such a context of cultural practices, can be initially defined as a critical and self-critical consideration of all fields of literary studies, regardless of their approach – analytical or interpretative, centred on history of literature, poetics or literary criticism, nomothetic or idiographic. The effects of that consideration were extrapolated to other texts of culture, including the non-linguistic texts. In short, within the proposed approach, theoretical literary studies, due to cognitive aims, can be treated as a laboratory of description of cultural practices, and due to the non-cognitive aims that inevitably follow – as a controfficial description of the social communication reality. The final conclusion shall constitute the Polish literary theory discourse as a new narrative type in our modernist scientific culture, characterized by its borderline character (between fictional and non-fictional narrative), hybridity (inclusion of different speech genres) and heteroglossiness (using various scientific and artistic idioms).<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

    The logical consequence of the proposed redefinition will be <\/span>\/1\/ <\/span>the revision of the tradition (philosophical and linguistic, German and Russian) considered vernacular to Polish literary theory and \/2\/ proposing a periodization different from the currently binding one, which will prove the inadequacy of separating modernism from postmodernism (Nycz 2012), question the relevance of the dichotomy of the \u201cformalist\u201d and \u201csociological\u201d options within modernism (Bourdieu 1984) and provide substantial arguments for the discontinual fluctuations. That will allow to determine the extent of the inconstancy of the discipline\u2019s status in the so called \u201elong duration\u201d with the maintaining of its scientific identity.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

    Proving the main hypothesis requires a thorough historical research. The methodologically obvious principle of \u201cprojecting diachrony onto synchrony\u201d and the non-controversial thesis of the cumulative character of knowledge within the humanities are not fully respected in Polish theory. That is due to the defected vision of its history, established as a result of two oppressions – the methodological and the universalist. The methodological oppression lies in the selection and arrangement of the material on the basis of preferring certain approaches dominant in the 60s., present in the only anthology published so far (Markiewicz 1960), which became a template for the subsequent monograph elaborations. Those preferences extorted limiting the text corpus to those evidently focused on defining the subject and methods of the newly established domain, but also resulted in methodological deformations (e.g. limiting certain scholars to one school or study; a good example is \u0141empicki \u2013 being the founder of a project of literary history as historical semantics, he was treated consequently as a phenomenologically oriented neoidealist, on basis of one single article published in 1921 entitled \u2018On Justifying the Idea of Pure Poetics\u2019). Moreover, in the case of modern Polish theory, constantly oscillating between opposite approaches (phenomenology and neopositivist analyticism, phenomenology and formalism), choosing one of them for strategic reasons, motivated by the necessity of making tactic alliances (like before World War II between formalists and neoidealists, and in postwar years between structuralists and phenomenolgists), the methodological differences are particularly blurred, still explicit in declarations, but not in the research practice. That is why they cannot serve as a sufficient foundation of description of its early modernist phase nor obviously the mature modernism – they are totally inadequate. Moreover today, when the methodological polemics are over, and scholars firmly opt for the \u201cweak theory\u201d, it seems proper to abandon the obsolete arrangements, forcing to raise problems that are unsolvable (is the Warsaw-Vilnus school Polish formalism or prestructuralism?) and somehow apparent (was Polish structuralism at once poststructuralism?).<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

    The second oppression, called universalist (transnational) is related to the self-colonialism of Polish theory, dating back to the 20s. It was a consequence of considering theory a cosmopolitic domain, alternative to the national history of literature, and the situation in the humanities after 1918, related to the geopolitical changes and modernization ambitions. Those conditions became out-of-date as soon as in the 30s., nevertheless the arrangements imposed on Polish theoretical studies mainly <\/span>via<\/i><\/span> German humanities (Suchodolski 1928) proved stiff and stable (Gorczy\u0144ski 2009). Consequently its originality and uniqueness faded, much like in the case of other cultural practices of Polish modernism, only recently elaborated in a comprehensive and synthetic manner (Bolecki 2012), though valuable detailed studies were published before. The innovative (although lacking material documentation) thesis, that literary theory is a new genre within the modernist literary culture (Cornis-Pope, Neubauer 2004) was not . taken into consideration. Neither detailed studies on modern Polish literature (Nycz 2002), nor monographs (Nycz 1997; Markowski 2007), nor anthologies (Paczoska, Magnone 2008) do not treat it as a new type of discourse.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

    The aim of those historical revalorizations shall be <\/span>\/1\/ <\/span>a rearrangement of Polish literary theory and a displacement of its hierarchy settled in the 60s. and the following radical shift of the scientific cultural memory, <\/span>\/2\/ <\/span>a verification of the periodization of the development of Polish theoretical literary studies and – due to a justified extrapolation – the Polish 20th century scientific culture <\/span>\/3\/ <\/span>coming up with an alternative periodization replacing the categories of \u201crupture\u201d, \u201cbreakthrough\u201d and \u201cturn\u201d by a dis-continous duration. It will help to regain the theoretical concepts absolutely original and revealing but forgotten or treated as marginal, concepts dating back to the 20s-60s. which raised issues \/a\/ elaborated in Polish cultural studies as far as in the 90s. (like e.g. regional studies, urban and suburban studies, studies on non-fiction and non-linguistic genres, sociolects of the amateur and outsider writings); <\/span>\/<\/span>b<\/span>\/ <\/span>offering mature projects of studies on intertextuality, intersemiotics, linguistic genre theory, generology, cognitive science, cultural poetics, cultural history of literature, translation studies) and \/c\/ practicing styles of scientific discourse non-standard in terms of common opinions about the scientific modernist culture (literary-like writings).<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

    The implementation of the historical aims shall be the innovative monographic anthology <\/span>The Age of Theory. The Century of Polish Theoretical Literary Studies.<\/span><\/i><\/span><\/span> It requires elaborating an original theoretical construct, which will guarantee proving the uniqueness of Polish literary theory and its intellectual appeal in the context of cultural changes of European literary studies in the 20th century. To achieve that a model of a academic anthology shall be created, alternative to standard models used (with rare exceptions; Nycz 1998) in Poland and abroad,. It will unite the poetics of two genres: monograph and anthology. The generic hybrid will enable to avoid the one-sidedness typical for each of them and maintain their advantages. The functionality and effectiveness of the proposed template will be verified in course of the team\u2019s practical research and possibly modified.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

    The elaboration of that alternative, integral scheme shall be preceded by a reconstruction of the modernist convention of both combined genres. Although they are, together with the dictionary and encyclopaedia, among the genres pivotal for the modernist scientific culture and were eagerly and commonly adopted in theoretical writings (see: \u2018References\u2019), they were not theoretically elaborated. The academic anthology is a theoretically neglected genre, similarly to the literary anthology; its definitions in lexicons almost without exceptions repeat stereotypical phrases of ancient provenience. The few studies devoted to the literary anthology (Hopkins 2008; Malecki 2008) limit themselves to referring the disapproving interpretations without a thorough historical diagnosis (Riding, Graves 1928). Meanwhile even the preliminary consideration shows that anthology is a genre emblematic for the modern scientific <\/span>paideia<\/i><\/span>, governed by social rationalism and the <\/span>Bildung<\/i><\/span> ideal. It combines various cultural tendencies, beliefs and approaches, related to scientific, but also political, social, demographic and economic processes which constitute modernity as the \u201cunfinished project\u201d. Without taking into account the complication established by the anthology, it is impossible for example to understand many modernist controversies like: the oscillation between the totality and the fragment, mimetic, performative, cognitive and projecting functions, renovation and innovation, certifying and producing, the ready-made status and the objective creation, individual authorship and anonymity, decanonisation and stabilization of the canon.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

    Contrary to the arbitrariness of the anthology, a weak point of the monograph is the inability or limited ability to verify the presented theses. Most commonly they are documented by a quote taken out of the context for the purposes of argument. The decontextualisation and recontextualisation of the fragmented original version deforms it, like in the anthology, but in the monograph those processes are counteracted by the conventionally vast paratextual elements (excursions, comments, footnotes, introductions, afterwords, references) and the expanded narrative.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

    To sum up: treating the anthology as a genre that in Polish theory represents the changes of scientific culture in conditions of the accelerating, and then systematically forced democratization, a genre more accessible than other, expanded forms of scientific discourse, and consequently much more vividly inspiring the popular intellectual imagination, justifies the innovative attempt to combine the poetics of anthology with the poetics of the monograph. Unifying the two genres will allow to avoid their defects and assure the planned effects. Thanks to integrating them: <\/span>\/1\/ <\/span>a text corpus will be created, assuring a reliable documentation of the monographic theses, <\/span>\/2\/ <\/span>the monographic theses will provide the collected texts with substantive and usefully arranged comments, which would <\/span>\/3\/ <\/span>justify the selection and the arrangement of the material, and <\/span>\/4\/ <\/span>justify substantially the described above main historical hypothesis.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

    The significance of the project in terms of history of science lies in the necessity of solving problems recurring in sociology of knowledge and intellectual history studies. Those complications are as follows:<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

    1\/ <\/span>The notion of the region conceptualized differently in different domains on the basis of changeable criteria (political, economic, geographic, geological, demographic, linguistic, religious, cultural). In the project the notion of the region is defined according to criteria of humanistic geography as an area where literary theory – a new domain in the scientific modernist cultures – was established, and limited to Central and Eastern European cities (Petersburg, Moscow, Warsaw, Lvov, Vilnus, Pozna\u0144, Prague, Bratislava, Berlin). The ideas elaborated there were not transferred to other urban areas until the 60s.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

    2\/ <\/span>The conditions of renovation and renaissance of the scientific ideas elaborated previously. Commonly those conditions are set according to the consonance between past and presence and the revival of the heritage resulting from that possibility (Habermas 2005), or on the contrary – the absolute distance of the past, which is not translatable to other discourses and therefore attractive (Quine 1986). In the submitted project both approaches are taken into account. That decision would justify the confrontation of various thought styles (Fleck 2007) developed in Polish theoretical literary studies, allow to compare them, estimate their duration and analyze their transformations related to cognitive and extra-cognitive conditions.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

    3\/ <\/span>The notion of the precursor, essential in the project as a basic criterion of material selection. In the case of humanities, where knowledge is cumulative, sanctioning a scientific discovery is much more problematic than in science (Popper 1977; Feyerabend 1999) and requires raising such issues as: \/a\/ the mechanism of the scientific success and failure, \/b\/ the institutional and non-institutional factors determining them, \/c\/ the establishment, stabilization and change of the canon. The material collected and chronologically arranged in the planned anthology will provide clear examples enabling to raise those issues competently. It will set ground to comparative studies (essential for example in the case of Stefania Skwarczy\u0144ska, whose concept of secondary literary genres established in the 30s. was precursory towards Mikhail Bakhtin\u2019s and contrary to Bakhtin\u2019s totally forgotten).<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

    4\/ <\/span>Determining to what extent and in which subdomains the theoretical literary studies (and generally the humanities) have a national character, and to what extent, as expressed in aspirations and declarations – it is universalist (transnational, cosmopolitan). The problem whether the notion of \u201cPolish theory\u201d is justified in the sense the notions \u201cFrench theory\u201d or \u201cRusskaya teorya\u201d are used (Todorov 1982; Zenkin 2004) or it is incorrect as incorrect is the notion \u201cPolish philosophy\u201d (Smith 1997) is raised by the Polish research practice whose specific character determined concentrating on specific theoretical domains and extorted different settlements than elsewhere in the region of Central and Eastern Europe. The material collected in the anthology will prove that literary theory in spite of the natural opposition versus the nationalist history of literature has a substantially national character (Adams, Tihanov 2011). As an argument will serve i.a. the analysis of terms; their meaning is non-commensurate in spite of common origin (like the Polish symbolist \u201euniezwyklenie\u201d contrary to the futurist Russian <\/span>\u201e\u043e\u0441\u0442\u0440\u0430\u043d\u0435\u043d\u0438\u0435\u201d; <\/span>the Polish \u201emowa pozornie zale\u017cna\u201d – with a totally different dimension than the Russian <\/span>\u201e\u043d\u0435\u0441\u043e\u0431\u0441\u0442\u0432\u0435\u043d\u043d\u043e \u043f\u0440\u044f\u043c\u0430\u044f \u0440\u0435\u0447\u044c\u201d) <\/span>and terms specific for Polish literary studies (like \u201cdevice nf\u2019, explained by its creator as \u201cthere is nothing in the plot that has not occurred the consiousness of the character\u201d, Hopensztand 1946; the genre term \u201cgaw\u0119da\u201d and \u201dmonolog wypowiedziany\u201d, different form the Russian <\/span>\u201c\u0441\u043a\u0430\u0437\u201d <\/span>due to historical contexts of establishing and explaining each). <\/span>5\/ <\/span>Accomplishing task <\/span>\/4\/ <\/span>will require establishing principles of comparing scientific cultures parallel to those established in Central and Eastern Europe studies for intellectual history (Sdizkov 2011) and literary cultures (Cornis-Pope, Neubauer 2004). Establishing those principles will allow to show the peculiarity of \u201ePolish theory\u201d, which in further study shall serve as a reference point for further comparative undertakings in the region. The effects of preliminary consideration allow already to point out the major common traits of \u201ePolish\u201d, \u201eRussian\u201d and \u201eCzech\u201d theories such as:<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n