Gombrowicz, Polish Modernism and the Subversion of Form

Tekstualia

The author of the article is interested in the story of three dissidents from Poland who wanted the center to read their struggle with time, to listen to their regressive, rebellious, prophetic narrations unanchored in time, distrustful towards the present, belated and yet ahead of the phantasmagorical temporalities of the center. It is a story about three artists who understood and described the regression of the language of fathers. Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Bruno Schulz and Witold Gombrowicz did not surrender to the fear that commands peripheries to seek refuge in the narrations of fathers against the dangers of modernity. In their respective works these authors had to address some problems of Polish modernism (1880–1918), that hasty attempt to make up for philosophical backwardness. In parodies of the exalted manner of Polish modernity, they found a grotesque, humorous aspect of the modern, almost non-existent in Polish literature from before 1918. A modern avant-garde form a...

Tekstualia

Witkacy, Gombrowicz, and Schulz do not belong to the same generation, but they create – each one differently – outstanding works of Polish modernism. Of the modernism that is the most important trans-generational current of the whole twentieth century, and which has lasted for a century already, because the problems and questions it raised more than 100 years ago have not yet either been solved or discredited. There is no doubt that each of these writers, individually and collectively, weighed down on the forms and themes of twentieth-century Polish literature. Their influence and meaning, however, go far beyond the domain of literature. Without Witkacy, Schulz, and Gombrowicz, Polish artistic culture and Polish intellectual life would be quite different.

Załącznik Kulturoznawczy, 2019

The authoress of the article continues the searches initiated by Jerzy Jarzębski and discusses the phenomenon of kitsch in the work of Witold Gombrowicz. The study is based on a content analysis of selected fragments of works by this author (especially the novel titled Ferdydurke) and it refers to certain concepts of modernity and postmodernity (W. Welsch, R. Rorty, J. Baudrillard). The writer himself is treated as an original philosopher of modernity (and later postmodernity); on account of this, he was ahead of his time. The work presents the thesis that Gombrowicz may be attributed both the modernist sense of the category of kitsch and its parodical practices, as well as a peculiar tendency for kitsch and a tendency to play with kitsch. This tendency is analyzed in the article as an attitude corresponding to the postmodern condition, especially its characteristic phenomenon called the aesthetization of culture, which was mentioned, among other things, by Wolfgang Welsch (culture ...

SLAVICA GANDENSIA, 2008

Amfiteater 1, 2023

The essay focuses on selected examples of the deconstruction of the opposition between representation and presentation, characteristic of post-mimetic art from the neo-avantgarde to the post-millennium. It discusses the authors who have been deconstructing the concept of drama and inventing new forms of redramatisation and post-dramatic intermediality from the 1960s to the present day. Despite persistently creating disruptions in the fictional textual cosmos, particular authors – such as Peter Handke in Offending the Audience, the group Pupilija Ferkeverk in Pupilija, Papa Pupilo and the Pupilceks, Dušan Jovanović in Monument G and Play a Tumour in the Head and Air Pollution, Milan Jesih in Limits and The Bitter Fruits of Justice, Matjaž Zupančič in The Corridor and other plays, Dragan Živadinov and his team in Supremat and other farewell rituals, Oliver Frljić in Damned be the Traitor of His Homeland, Simona Semenić in 1981, and Žiga Divjak and Katarina Morano in various projects – establish a strong process of redramatisation in their theatrical texts and performances. It is as if, alongside the deconstruction of drama, they inject dramatic and theatrical elements into the post-dramatic process of staging and writing. Thus, post-mimetic art coexists with pre-mimetic art, as this “stripping down” of the representativity of drama led to the establishment of fiction.

In this paper I attempt a parallel reading of certain texts by Pavel Florensky and Hans-Georg Gadamer, particularly, although not exclusively, Florensky’s seminal essay “Reverse Perspective”, and Gadamer’s main work Truth and Method. I do not thereby seek to establish a problematic historical-philosophical connection between the two thinkers. I rather analyze some notions and considerations developed by both of them in order to allow the emergence of some common views, or at least of common orientations, in relation to two overarching aesthetic topics: on the one side, what can preliminarily be labelled a critique of modern aesthetics, and on the other an idea of the aesthetic experience as taking place in what I will call a performative space. While, in relation to the first point, both authors seem to adopt a Hegelian reading of modernity, characterized on the one side by an alienated subjectivity, on the other side by the reduction of the world to a collection of dead objects, the second point indicates a possible alternative to this lamentable situation, consisting in the conception of a (performative) space, where acquaintance with objects can only be achieved via participation in events. In this respect, while both authors developed their views in the course of reflection on cultural and artistic phenomena of the past (medieval visual arts and Greek tragedy respectively), they come to results which have been reached autonomously by those aesthetic approaches that are premised on the so-called performative turn.

Transnationality, Internationalism and Nationhood. European Avant-Garde in the First Half of the Twentieth Century (= Groningen Studies in Cultural Change 48), eds Hubert van den Berg, Lidia Głuchowska, Leuven/ Paris/ Walpole, MA: Peeters Publishers, 2013, ISBN: 978–90–429–2756–8. , 2013

This paper is a characteristic of the coexistence of the Avant-garde internationalism and some national aspects in the classical works and theory of the Central European Avant-garde. I also discussed questions and media of networking in the cultural transfer and so-called new art history with regard to the works from so-called peripheries