Myth forms the central interpretive category for Bruno Schulz’s fiction. The approaches range from ideological appropriations through the Polish messianism, biographical reductions or theological ...exegeses. In the present article, on the other hand, connections are made to Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms to show how Schulz adopts in his narratives resounding theorems of modern myth reception. It is argued that the transfer of the concept of myth to the subjective world of his own childhood is linked to questioning of rational models of reality. At the same time, this is differentiated from the assumption that Schulz uses myth in an irrationally transfiguring way: the power of myth is broken by the fact that he consistently relativizes his mythologizing principle and in this way presents himself as a dubious agent of rationalization. This leads to a claim that his reference to myth is not an affirmative adoption of modern mythologization, but it turns out to be a deconstructive play with traditional aesthetic forms, which is systematically geared towards the outsourcing of his fiction from normative categories and, at the same time, reflects the potential danger of mythologization that promises salvation.
In an interesting and in some ways innovative essay, “Two Romantic Worlds. On Bruno Schulz and Witold Gombrowicz” Dwa światy romantyczne. O Brunonie Schulzu i Witoldzie Gombrowiczu, published in 1938 ...in Skamander, Henryk Vogler called Schulz „the most genuine – perhaps even the only – representative of femininity in our literature.” This intuitive claim certainly deserves to be remembered not only because Vogler as the only critic of the inter-war period and one of very few at that time made an attempt to turn gender into an aesthetic category applicable to Schulz’s fiction, but also because he recognized its “femininity” as a value. Such an approach was by no means obvious. Along with the development of feminist movements and the crisis of masculinity which surfaced in literature and art after the Great War, opposite trends were still present in the inter-war decades. They were trying not only to conserve, but to strengthen the hegemonic fascist model of masculinity also in Poland of the 1930s. If, however, Schulz’s fiction has some features of the feminine writing – if such comparison can shed some light on his stories – he came close not so much to the styles which were radically opposite, i.e. dependent on the masculine idiom, but to those which worked through “delicate deviations” as if from the inside, destabilizing and opening it to new contexts. In this case, “delicate” is
not a synonym of „insignificant,” but points at hardly comprehensible, ambiguous rhythms of the écriture feminine. Asking questions about the ties which connect gender and modes of expression, we keep moving along delicate boundaries separating existence, aesthetics, ethics, and politics. This, suggests Elaine Showalter, „makes us obliged to answer with equal delicacy and precision.” I believe that in the case of Schulz instead of strong oppositions one should rather emphasize movement – a continuous, endless process of differentiating instead of a polar opposition of the masculine and feminine.
Polish translation of the Heinrich Traber’s preface and the first part of Führer durch Traber’s Panoptikum und Anatomisches Museum, Verlag von Heinrich Traber, Druck von Wilhelm Neuman, Pirmasens ...n.d..
The starting point of this paper was a research presentation at an academic conference about Schulz’s “antimodern modernism,” organized by Marek Tomaszewski, Małgorzata Smorąg-Goldberg, and Paweł ...Rodak in Paris on June 9th, 2017. At the crossroads of literature and art history, the author aims at showing how formlessness, as defined in 1929 by Georges Bataille, haunts Bruno Schulz’ fiction (in Polish “bezkształtność” or “bezformie”). His literary works have already been associated with various trends of the Central European modernism, but it should also be linked to the early development of the Informal Arts in this area, before it revolutionized post-war painting. Given Schulz’s taste for old printed books, and the nature of his own drawings and engravings (in the cliché-verre or glass print technique), a survey of all the traces of the idea of formlessness in his literary works leads to a conclusion that there is an anachronism between texts and images. Such a gap between universal form dissolution in fiction and its static graphic counterpart remains to be interpreted: how can Schulz’s works both look back to the nostalgic pre-war realities and anticipate post-war artistic, if not philosophical, tendencies?
O zjadaniu Innych Szerszeń, Tomasz
Schulz Forum,
2021
17-18
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Anthropophagy returns in the works of the inter-war avant-gardes as an important and overdetermined metaphor which describes, e.g., the attitudes to tradition and otherness. The appropriation and ...devouring of the Other becomes not only a description of certain artistic and ethnographic practices, but perhaps also or even in the first place a hidden paradigm of our culture. The frame within which anthropophagic metaphors appeared at that time was the critique of capitalism and colonialism. The author considers that anthropophagic phantasy and its various – anthropological, literary, and political – contexts. His object of interest is the journal Documents (particularly photos by Jacques-Andre Boiffard and a text by Georges Bataille), Roger Caillois’s essay on the praying mantis, the key text of the Brazilian avant-garde, Anthropophagic Manifesto by Oswald de Andrade, and “The Street of Crocodiles” by Bruno Schulz.
Polish translation of one chapter from Georges Didi-Huberman’s book La ressemblance informe. Le Gai Savoir visuel selon Georges Bataille, Paris: Macula, 1995.
In stark contrast to the widespread preoccupation with the wartime
looting of priceless works of art, Bożena Shallcross focuses on the meaning of
ordinary objects -- pots, eyeglasses, shoes, ...clothing, kitchen utensils -- tangible
vestiges of a once-lived reality, which she reads here as cultural texts. Shallcross
delineates the ways in which Holocaust objects are represented in Polish and
Polish-Jewish texts written during or shortly after World War II. These
representational strategies are distilled from the writings of Zuzanna Ginczanka,
WÅadysÅaw Szlengel, Zofia NaÅkowska, CzesÅaw MiÅosz, Jerzy Andrzejewski, and
Tadeusz Borowski. Combining close readings of selected texts with critical
interrogations of a wide range of philosophical and theoretical approaches to the
nature of matter, Shallcross's study broadens the current discourse on the Holocaust
by embracing humble and overlooked material objects as they were perceived by
writers of that time.
