Ryszard Nycz, an eminent Polish scholar, is a professor emeritus of Polish literature at the Jagiellonian University in Krakόw and the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw and the author of numerous books, including Poetyka doświadczenia. Teoria, nowoczesność, literatura The poetics of experience. Theory, modernity, literature, The Language of Polish Modernism, Culture as Verb. Probes into the New Humanities, and others.1 His research departs from a traditional understanding of Polish literature to focus on the anthropology of literature and the poetics of experience. He emphasizes the importance of interpreting texts through a process of (re)reading to discover new truths. According to Nycz, literary texts are also cultural texts, as they provide a symbolic representation of individual and collective aspects of human life. Thus, literature should be viewed as the art of narrating the human condition and the poetics of experience closely related to existential matters.Edited by Jerzy Franczak and Tomasz Kunz, Sztuka inwencji. Ryszarda Nycza praktykowanie humanistyki: Rozmowy, inspiracje, kontynuacje The art of invention: Ryszard Nycz and his way of practicing the humanities; Conversations, inspirations, and continuations is a festschrift by Professor Nycz's colleagues and former doctoral students from the Jagiellonian University to celebrate his seventieth birthday and scholarly achievements. The volume consists of three parts: Rozmowy Conversations, Relektury Rereads, and Sondowanie humanistyki Probing the humanities. The parts synergistically create a form of dialogue that enriches the material presented in the book.Part 1, Conversations, incorporates three discussions between Nycz and Elżbieta Rybicka, Jakub Momro, and Agnieszka Dauksza. These interlocutors probe Nycz's vision of the humanities and point out the authors who have influenced his academic work. The list of writers includes Wacław Berent who introduced Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy to twentieth-century Polish literature, Stanisław Brzozowski, Karol Irzykowski, Witold Gombrowicz, Czesław Miłosz, Janusz Sławiński, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and others. Inspired by Nietzsche and Berent, Nycz envisions literature as the hermeneutics of existential experience in which the subjective time of reading plays an essential role (pp. 12, 33). He values in literature a processual approach that stresses change, movement, and activism. For him, a similar idea is present in Berent's writings as the author of Próchno Rotten wood2 uses the concept of seeking through seeking (“szukanie szukaniem”) to accentuate processualism in literary actions (p.14). Berent also emphasizes emotions, and his texts require “affectionate interpretation” with an empathetic lens, but Brzozowski is the author who strongly highlights the importance of following spontaneous emotions in a process of reading (Powieść jako dzieło sztuki A novel as an artwork, 1902).3 On the other hand, Irzykowski is also important as the forerunner of Jacques Derrida in twentieth-century Polish literary criticism. Brzozowski and Irzykowski represent two different viewpoints related to literature (p.19), but both focus on vital literary concepts such as “I” and “reality,” according to Nycz. Furthermore, Gombrowicz should be praised for his ability to depart from stereotypical thinking. He proves, through laughter, that different interpretations of reality are possible. Similarly, Miłosz's monumental works probe various contexts of reality to discover its essence. For Nycz, the above writers artistically assert that a literary and cultural text provides self-knowledge and leads to understanding (p.23). For this reason, great literary texts should be reread through a prism of varied contexts to find their up-to-date interpretation and meaning. Overall, Part 1, Conversations emphasizes the complex nature of a text and reveals its epistemological as well as existential function (p. 29). It also shows that, similarly to Adorno, Nycz supports the idea of text that does not present a simple and unified picture of the world but rather shows contradictions and diverse viewpoints to stress its intricate nature (p.30).In part 2, Rereads, the perspective of the textual debate is enlarged. Metaphorically, various literary texts become a scientific laboratory where scholars probe anthropological self-knowledge, cultural memory, irony, epiphany, relations between humans and objects, identity, affects, and other concepts. And so, Michał Paweł Markowski examines hate as a powerful affect in Fyodor Dostoevsky's psychological literary fiction. It leads Dostoevsky's characters to destruction, presents itself as the conflict between the will's autonomy and heteronomy, and shows the life of “double focus” between desire and hate. The affect of hatred is an essential feature of European modernism, according to Markowski (p. 82).Also in part 2, Dorota Wojda probes links between Nietzsche's works and Berent's Diogenes w kontuszu Diogenes dressed in a robe, 1937;4 treating them as a “permanent parabasis,” she discovers expressions of irony, conceptual discourse, and an individual identity. In “Modernity in a Shade of Green: Leśmian and Stevens. A Note (Not Only) Ecocritical,” Jan Zięba moves ahead to focus on the metaphor of the suffering body and pinpoint the relationship between reality and modern poetry expressed by Bolesław Leśmian as the “song without words” and as the “language without words” by Wallace Stevens (pp. 103–122). Next, using the first Polish biography of Chaplin by Konstanty Jankowski and the prose texts by Witold Gombrowicz, Jalu Kurek, and Leo Belmont, Eugenia Prokop-Janiec opens up a distinct perspective by analyzing the status of a film actor in literary works. A particular stress is put on the existing interrelation between an actor (the empirical person) and a film persona (a fictitious character) to reveal the complexity of an artistic game. In her erudite essay, Anna Łebkowska examines “Kanapowe kraje” Couch lands by Maria Kuncewiczowa.5 Using the subject's recollection and relations between the phantom-like London and the interwar nonexistent Warsaw, the article investigates modernity, ways of constructing a cultural memory, and the topography of a stranger. Finally, it reveals how to interpret one's own culture through a foreign culture and gain the anthropological self-knowledge to domesticate an alien place (p. 144).Andrzej Zawadzki focuses on the morphology of culture and dissects concepts by Stanisław Vincenz and the Romanian philosopher Lucian Blaga. Both stress ethnicity and folk cultures, in the Hutsul region and Transylvania, asserting that there is a close relation between culture and cognition (archaic premodern mental structures). Stressing the new humanities promoted by Nycz, Helena Duć-Fajfer's article views the poem “Epiphany” by a Lemko poet Petro Murianka as a cultural reading and situates it in a diverse perspective of native Lemko ideas, minority discourse, memory rituals (the living memory), and ontological-cognitive aspects of an epiphany. Magdalena Popiel interestingly examines the letters exchanged between Witold Gombrowicz and Jean Dubuffet (from 1968 to 1969) to detect determinants of culture, humanities, art reception, and a creative process. The two artists similarly recognize the experience of creativity and the experience of suffering as crucial conceptualization of culture, according to the scholar. Elżbieta Rybicka discusses the poetics of experience in Miron Białoszewski's poetry by revealing the Polish version of modernity (socmodernity) with communal housing apartments, their crowded space (visual aspects), listening through walls, and residential noise (audial aspects). But the poet is still able to creatively transform the above experience into a poem. Going forward, Justyna Tabaszewska examines Dorota Masłowska's literary evolution of affects stressing the narrative techniques and affects of shame and aversion (Sianne Ngai's “ugly affects”) Masłowska uses to depict the post-transformational reality after 1989. Inspired by Nycz's book Culture as Verb and Paweł Kaczmarski's literary novel, Przemysław Rojek ends Part 2 by probing the ethos of political engagement in modern Polish poetry.Part 3 of the volume, Probing the Humanities, proposes new interpretations of literary and cultural texts. It also builds an intelligible bridge leading (eventually) to the new humanities. The new humanities should encompass a collection of disciplines, including digital humanities, cognitive humanities, art-based humanities, cultural-literary studies, and others. The research tools and areas of new Polish humanities are indicated in part 3 through various terms and concepts such as, the epistemology of “crystal” projecting knowledge (Jakub Momro, pp. 257–275), emotive analysis and research on memory in the Polish People's Republic (Kinga Siewor, pp. 277–295) as well as applying Michael Rothberg's theory of implicated subject to Polish film studies and Polish culture memory (Maria Kobielska, pp. 297–313). Furthermore, Jerzy Franczak assertively demonstrates, in his essay on serfdom and peasant resistance (Jakub Szela in the Galicia region), how to subvert dominant discourses through modern folk xenology and theories of otherness (pp. 315–331) and Magda Heydel and Roma Sendyka provide an interdisciplinary analysis of a translation-research project on Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, traumatic memory, and testimonial translation (pp. 333–353). Tomasz Majewski examines a documentary film genre through the lens of a cultural framework, including Jeffrey C. Alexander's theory of cultural trauma (pp. 355–371). Piotr Oczko highlights thematic links between the 1720 poem “Panpoëticon Batavum” by Lambert Bildoo and a collection of miniature portraits by Arnold van Halen, an eighteenth-century Dutch painter (pp. 373–393). Following Nycz's ideas, Aleksandra Szczepan sketches a possible “civil history of Polish literature” with Jan Kott, Miron Białoszewski, and Magdalena Tulli as its representatives (pp. 395–410). Anna Foltyniak-Pękala works within the poetics of experience probing the “affection” and “affectionate narrator” in Olga Tokarczuk's writings and contrasting them with works by Kazimierz Brandys. Tomasz Kunz underlines the idea of sylleptic ego, relates it to subjectivity (“metaleptic subject”) and examines its status in Magdalena Tulli's Comical Syllables and Rafał Wojaczek's poem “On the Highest Note” (pp. 425–441). Nonetheless, using intertextual semiotics, video game mods (for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim), and concepts of pastiche and parody, Tomasz Z. Majkowski introduces the poetics of mods (pp. 443–463). Later, in his interesting essay, Marek Pieniążek discusses creative performance in the humanities, recollecting the film Le Mans 66 (2019) and relations between a genuine scholarly innovation as well as its institutionalized forms (employed researchers). Note that Marian Zaczyński ends the tome by providing a comprehensive biobibliography of Ryszard Nycz (pp. 481–595).In terms of its book length (606 pp.) and thematic abundance, the volume presents itself as a monumental work which should be read critically and carefully. It uses diverse methodologies and interdisciplinary viewpoints to address an entanglement of cultural, epistemological, and social challenges that the humanities face in our times. It is an important publication and should be studied not only for the sake of personal intellectual development, but also for the benefit of society. As Martha C. Nussbaum has pointed out, a good education should possess “the spirit of the humanities: by searching critical thought, daring imagination, empathetic understanding of human experiences of many different kinds, and understanding of the complexity of the world we live in.”6
Jolanta Wrobel-Best (Thu,) studied this question.