„Nieustanna aktualizacja”
“Nieustanna aktualizacja [Constant Actualisation]”

On a Metacritical Thread in Michał Głowiński’s Writings

Summary/Abstract: Communicological direction of Michał Głowiński’s papers is responsible for the fact that literature is understood not only as a collection of texts with distinct features. As a cultural fact it is constructed in the reception process which is of historical and social character. A result of this is a significant role of criticism, an instance operating in a specific (in Głowiński’s view, aesthetic) style of reception, as well as an element which partakes in the mode of understanding literature in a given historical period (“Style odbioru” <”Styles of Reception”>, 1977). In an important monograph “Ekspresja i empatia” (“Expression and Empathy”) (1997) Głowiński pinpoints the most vital features of Young Poland’s literary-critical discourse. He uses the term “discourse” in accordance with the tradition of native text linguistics. Nevertheless, the researcher strongly emphasizes the historical dimension of Young Poland’s critical discourse as a text-producing practice. Its properties, namely expressiveness, critical mimesis, “principle of terminological minimum,” and “free indirect speech in criticism,” etc. become at the same time a concrete realization of a broader directive according to which the task of modern (sensu largo) criticism is “constant actualisation” of the communicative potential that the reviewer finds in the texts he comments on. It is for this reason that the achievements of the criticism at the turn of the 19th and 20th c. in the Polish tradition become a specimen of the modern radical criticism which strives to strengthen, intensify, and actualise both the literary potential and that of its own. Głowiński’s firm inspiration for his thinking about criticism was Ostap Ortwin’s 1934 short sketch “Samoistność krytyki literackiej” (“Intrinsic Literary Criticism”). Głowiński many a times referred to the formula from the sketch according to which “criticism problematizes literature” not only to redefine it, but also to develop its own discourse.

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