Ruch Literacki

This article tries to highlight the key elements of the culture-based process of reading. To get it in focus it is necessary to consider the contemporary evolution of the status of the literary text, the authorial subject and the reading subject; and, in effect, to abandon the traditional, literature-centric model of reception. Instead, we need to adopt an ap-proach that gives full weight to remediation, the dynamic interplay of old and new media, which deprives the literary text of its original embedment in the legacy literary culture associated with writing and the printed word. The article notes the growing role of paratexts, cultural narratives and artifacts, which today increasingly influence the reception and understanding of a literary work. The recognition of the heterogeneous nature of the text itself and the blurring of the boundaries between the textual subject and the empirical subject have led to the exhaustion of the traditional textual paradigm. It is being displaced by a mode of reading in which the focus of interest shifts to the biographical author (i.e. his biography, including details of his private life). As the read-ing process acquires the character of a (quasi-personal) relationship, the status of the reading subject changes, too. He/she morphs from an solitary sovereign “I” into a rela-tionship-oriented ‘decentralized’ subject. At this point the article draws on Elizabeth Long's idea of ‘collective reading’, which posits the overcoming of an individualized act of reading by a communal reading experience.

This article is based on the assumption, formulated in the introduction, that genetic criticism (i.e. literary study and editorial practice aimed at reconstructing the creative process behind the available texts, records, etc.) has the potential for inventiveness, innovation, and establishing its creative presence in the field of contemporary huma-nities. These prospects are not threatened by the recent technological breakthroughs which seriously affect the textual process itself. Consequently, the main thesis put for-ward in the article asserts that genetic criticism can constitute – under certain condi-tions – an effective and interesting form of practicing the “anthropology of the creative process”, postulated by Ryszard Nycz as a “full-fledged branch of literary studies”. To demonstrate in practice the anthropological potential of creative genetic criticism the article outlines three analytical and interpretative strategies and objectives that it af-fords. The first consists in deploying the tools of genetic criticism to explore the somatic dimension of the text-making process; the second expands the study of drafts and other pre-text materials so to expose the network-relational character of creativity, “playing out” in interactions between human and non-human actors as well as other actants involved in the text-making; the third is concerned with bridges between critical genetic studies and sociology or the study of cultural politics of affect and emotion.

Stanisław Wyspiański wrote the November Night over nearly four years (1900–1904). At the same time he was working on the layout of its staging, drew sketches of the set design and planned the musical setting. As fragments of this preparatory work were published incrementally before the text of the play was ready to print, they form a record of the dramatist’s ongoing creative process. This article focuses on the modifications of the original idea (the November Uprising of 1830) and his search for a language that would be free from patriotic symbolism.

This article explores the connections between Tadeusz Miciński’s travel experience of the Tatra Mountains and Podhale and the workings of his creative process. Traktat o piekle podhalańskim [A Treatise on Podhale Hell] (1906), a reportage from Chochołów, where he joined the local priest on his round of Christmas visits, offers solid proof of the writer’s personal knowledge of the region and the real life of its inhabitants. His poems and poetic prose highlighting the Tatra Mountains (including the highly-acclaimed cycle of lyrics Tatry) would not have been written if it were not for his mountain hikes. Some these poems, thoroughly revised, were incorporated into the poetic anti-novel Nietota, where they contribute to its weird effects. Originally published in serial installments in 1908-1909, Nietota: The Secret Book of the Tatras with its concoction of genres, themes, symbols and registers remains a fascinating product of a creative process run wild.

This article presents an interpretation of Georges Perec’s Ellis Island and the People of America from the perspective of the anthropology of the creative process. While in the centre of this study is the last version of Récits d’Ellis Island, reprinted in the second volume of his Ouvres complètes (Gallimard, 2017), it reaches out to the earlier album, the film documentary and the essay in pursuit of their interconnections. The aim is, first, to gain insight into the complex creative history of the work as it mutates, combining with media like photography or film, to produce new versions of itself; and second, to for-mulate questions – in the spirit of the artist’s aesthetics – about the key issues of co- authorship (with Robert Bober), signature (as defined by Jacques Derrida), intertextuality and autobiography. Finally, the article argues, a closer look at the intricacies of his creative process allows us to gain a better understanding of the dimensions of memory and politics in Perec’s late work.

One of the most notable trends in contemporary fictions of the autobiographical kind is the fading away of self referentiality. Not so long ago authors would often comment on the their way of getting along with the writing, share or expose for questioning their emotions and motives, i.e. they wrote and re-wrote themselves. Now, it seems, that self- conscious preoccupation with oneself and one's creative performance is giving way to a nexus of the body with its physical sensations, affects, everyday experiences and writing (poetic expression). Writing is, after all, a repetitive physical activity like any other daily routines (nowhere is that more apparent than in the novels of Wioletta Grzegorzewska, Dorota Kotas, Małgorzata Lebda and Dorota Masłowska). It functions as a link between the subject with its emotions, its corporeality and the material con-creteness of the world. The recognition of that fact brings with it a new understanding of literature, its role and function.