1001 mostów, które warto przebyć, by rozmawiać o literaturze
1001 bridges worth crossing to talk about literature

Summary/Abstract: The article discusses the most important theoretical issues and topical themes found in Rita Felski’s Uses of Literature, and indicates how the book can be used for didactic purposes as an academic textbook. Felski’s Uses of Literature is considered as an example of post-structural and condensed academic writing, which, according to Zygmunt Bauman, involves translating rather than legislating theory. As a postmodern translator, Felski translates the languages of different traditions and theoretical innovations into the language of the humanities, understandable to a broader literary audience, by means of a key metaphor used in the book: building and crossing bridges. Using these tactics, he highlights what the study of literature and culture shares with other fields of the humanities, centred around the experience of daily contact with literary texts and cultural artefacts, and makes this a basis for acting in the world. The article takes a cue from Felix and develops the metaphor of bridges, pointing to the author’s conciliatory gestures toward “everyday knowledge” and a sceptical view of the hermeneutics of suspicion and the specific positioning of the monograph in relation to the everyday challenges of engaged literary studies, i.e. the crisis of reading and marketing books in the era of late capitalism.

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