Zbigniew Morsztyn spotyka Stephena Dedalusa
Zbigniew Morsztyn Meets Stephen Dedalus

Summary/Abstract: Originating from the concept of literature being total and timeless, the essay rereads Zbigniew Morsztyn’s Myśl ludzka [Human Thought] and a short passage from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The cosmographies identified in both texts prove to be not just allegorical maps of the human thought − a baroque and modernist one referred to as geocentric and egocentric one respectively but also reversed copies of each other. Joyce andMorsztyn independently discovered this ‘everything’ − a virtual content of the human thought, just as Augustine of Hippo had before them and described it in the tenth book of his Confessions. Both Morsztyn and Joyce figuratively described this microscopic substance of thought as infinite in Pascal’s terms yet, strangely enough, their descriptions are somewhat symmetrically reversed.

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