Darmowy fragment publikacji:
RECIPROCITIES:
Essays in Honour
of Professor Tadeusz Rachwał
NR 3234
RECIPROCITIES:
Essays in Honour
of Professor Tadeusz Rachwał
Edited by
Agnieszka Pantuchowicz
Sławomir Masłoń
Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego ● Katowice 2014
Redaktor serii: Historia Literatur Obcych:
Magdalena Wandzioch
Recenzent:
Zofia Kolbuszewska
…a grateful mind
By owing owes not, but still pays, at once
Indebted and discharg’d;…
John Milton, Paradise Lost,
Book IV, ll. 55–7
Contents
inTRoduction
Anna ‑Zeidler ‑Janiszewska
Artysta w przestrzeniach przyrodoznawstwa. O wybranych praktykach
Marka Diona
Piotr Fast
O tytule eseju Watermark Josifa Brodskiego
Anna Węgrzyniak
Więzy i więzi. Ości w Ościach Ignacego Karpowicza
Anna Czarnowus
“Ich mot wende in mi way”: The Construction of Masculinity through
Travelling in Le Pèlérinage de Charlemagne and the Stanzaic Guy of
Warwick
Andrzej Wicher
The Place of William Shakespeare’s (Lost) Cardenio in the Context of the
Late Romances
Przemysław Uściński
Borderlines/Ornaments in Eighteenth Century Classical Discourse
Jeremy Tambling
“Living On”: On Smart, Cowper, and Blake
9
15
28
38
60
74
87
106
8
Jacek Mydla
Contents
Joanna Baillie’s Theatre of Sympathy and Imagination
Małgorzata Nitka
Wordsworth, the Railway and “the riot of the town”
Katarzyna Więckowska
On Uselessness
Mary Conde
Reading “Mrs Bathurst”
Jacek Wiśniewski
129
151
166
177
Travelling in Search of Spring: Edward Thomas’s In Pursuit of Spring
as Travel Literature
184
David Malcolm
Traffic with the Enemy: The Traitor in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the
Day, Rebecca West’s The Meaning of Treason, and Francis Stuart’s Black
List, Section H.
Tymon Adamczewski
The Spectral Difference: On Hauntology in Sarah Waters’ The Little
Stranger
204
216
Edyta Lorek ‑Jezińska
On Haunting as Metaphysical Stalking: The Middle Story and a Piece of
Charred Ectoplasm
228
Sławomir Konkol
“Skedaddle, Ellie”: Feminine Mobility, Tourism and Capital in Graham
Swift’s Wish You Were Here
241
Krzysztof Knauer
Spoilt for Choice? Self ‑fashioning and Institutionalised Identities versus
“Being Oneself” in Contemporary London Literature
Sławomir Masłoń
Audio ‑graphy: Meaning and Irrationality in Music
266
291
inTRoduction
Professor Tadeusz Rachwał teaches at Szkoła Wyższa Psychologii
Społecznej (the University of Social Sciences and Humanities) in War‑
saw. He is in perpetual motion across northern Poland, using any means
at hand (he has neither a car nor a driving license). It has not always
been that way.
TR (he will excuse this) was born on the 12th of April, 1954 in Gliwice,
southern Poland, to an itinerant family of mixed cultural roots. There, in
the Upper Silesian region where Polish, German, and Bohemian cultu‑
ral influences intermingle, he grew up and paid his dues, on the street
and at school. What his intentions were when, in 1973, he enrolled in the
Academy of Economics in Katowice is in retrospect difficult to say – but
after a semester he changed his mind and the following year became
a student at the Institute of English Philology at the University of Sile‑
sia, Katowice.
TR’s interest in research goes back to his fourth year as a student, when
for the first time he took part in a conference organized by the Maria
Curie ‑Skłodowska University in Lublin where he delivered a paper on
phonetics and phonology in generative grammar, which may have been
quite impressive because he was awarded a prize for it. His scholarly
work continued to such good effect that his M.A. thesis, devoted to the
topic of idiomatics in transformational ‑generative model of grammar,
was appraised as outstanding, in recognition of which an abridged ver‑
sion of it was published in Neophilologica, an annual linguistic journal
published by the University of Silesia.
10
inTRoduction
After receiving his M.A. degree in linguistics, TR taught English
for a year at a secondary school in Gliwice – Wittgenstein ‑like, one
can say, though, TR being the mildest of men, there certainly was no
ear ‑ or hair ‑pulling involved. After testing his mettle in basic lan‑
guage teaching, in September 1980 he became employed as an assistant
professor in the Institute of English Philology at the University of
Silesia (a kind of misnomer in this case because the Modern Langua‑
ges Department is located in Sosnowiec, which lies across the Brynica
River and therefore technically not in Silesia but Zagłębie). At first his
interest in theoretical linguistics continued, but gradually his research
into the problems of semiotics led him to expand into literary semio‑
tics and then into literary theory and philosophy, especially Jacques
Derrida’s deconstruction, which was scarcely known in Poland at the
time. One of the results (or causes – one can never be sure and this is
not necessarily a Derridean insight) of his interest in deconstruction was
the beginning of a long friendship and scholarly collaboration between
TR and Tadeusz Sławek, his older colleague at the English Institute.
Soon they became a well ‑known academic duo, publishing a series of
articles and finally three book ‑length studies (one with a third collabo‑
rator) devoted to English literature and culture of the 17th and 18th cen‑
turies.
At the beginning of the 1980s Tadeusz Rachwał and Tadeusz Sławek
were among the four founding members of the “Er(r)go Seminar” rese‑
arch group (the other two being Wojciech Kalaga and the late Emanuel
Prower) which made the Silesian “school” a recognized theoretical cen‑
tre of English literary and cultural studies in Poland with an internatio‑
nal reputation. By 1992 the group had published six volumes of studies
devoted to the problems of interpretation theory. During this period TR
quickly became one of the major Polish authorities on Jacques Derrida’s
thought, which found its culmination in the first Polish book devoted
to Derrida, which he co ‑wrote with Taduesz Sławek: Maszyna do pisania.
O dekonstruktywistycznej teorii Jacquesa Derridy, published in 1992. TR’s
continual and intensive engagement with 18th century literary and cultu‑
ral issues found printed form in the Foucauldian analyses of Word and
Confinement: Subjectivity and Classical Discourse (1992) and the aforemen‑
tioned books written together with Tadeusz Sławek: Lines, Planes and
inTRoduction
11
Solids: Studies in Seventeenth‑Century Writings (1992) and Sfera szarości.
Studia nad literaturą i myślą osiemnastego wieku (1993).
The crooked ways of Enlightenment literary theory and practice have
never ceased to engage TR, which is also confirmed by the large number
of articles he has devoted to it thus far, and by yet another book, Appro‑
aches of Infinity: The Sublime and the Social (1993) dealing with the 18th
century ramifications (and domestications) of the discourse of the sub‑
lime. It is this monograph in particular which perhaps best explains TR’s
constant fascination with the 18th century because, in its refashioning of
the category of the sublime, the epoch seems uncannily to prefigure
the problematics of the poststructuralist discourse in which sublimity
itself becomes one of the most central concepts or even (in Jean ‑François
Lyotard’s thought) the foundation of postmodernity as such.
A separate but related sphere of TR’s intellectual interests has been
the work of Bruno Schulz, a Polish ‑Jewish modernist writer, whose
sometimes surprisingly deconstructive intuitions have been very con‑
genial to TR, witness the number of papers he devoted to this aspect of
Schulz’s work. Moreover, the issues encountered while struggling with
the tightly ‑woven texture of this writer’s ambiguous meanings turned
out to lead further into translatological problems (explored in further
papers), therefore bringing TR back into the core aspects of deconstru‑
ction for which translation and linguistic multiplicity are very important
theoretical issues.
Perhaps it can be ascribed to a deconstructive bent in TR’s mind that
he kept finding his thought roaming far and wide and finding new
chances of international collaboration. Apart from the aforementioned
long ‑standing joint research with Tadeusz Sławek, TR co ‑originated and
co ‑published a number of papers together with his English friends and
intellectual interlocutors (also sometime residents in Poland), Claire
Hobbs and the late lamented David Jarrett, the latter a co ‑author with
Sławek and TR of a fascinating analysis of the discourse of 17th and 18th
century gardening Geometry, Winding Paths and the Mansions of Spirit.
A restless deconstructive mind, thriving on impurities, alloys, and
cross ‑fertilisation, and fascinated by unseemly mixtures and monstros‑
ities, is at home in Upper Silesia, a region of borderlands and cross‑
‑cultural interchange, which has been damaged by heavy industry, an
12
inTRoduction
area full of waste matter and unexpected concoctions. TR’s place under
the smoke ‑veiled sun and the home of a certain theoretical attitude it
seemed to be. But nothing lasts forever and as after twenty odd years
the Er(r)go group – the foundation on which the Silesian “school” rested
and which finally resulted in the founding of the Institute of English
and American Literature and Culture1 (of which TR was vice ‑director
between 1999 and 2002) – finally crumbled, TR, a full professor by that
time, renewed his peregrinations.
TR founded the School of English Language Cultures and Literatu‑
res at the University of Bielsko ‑Biała in 2002. He also moved from Sile‑
sia to the mountain region of Podbeskidzie where he divided his time
between administrative duties, scholarly activities, and walking in the
woods. For a couple of years he enjoyed living in a flat directly facing
the mountains, but this idyll was regularly interrupted by visits to the
holy city of Częstochowa where he also taught. Quite a bit of his educa‑
tional and scholarly oeuvre of that time was devoted to representation of
minority discourses in the academia. In 2005 he finally decided to test
the charms of the capital of Poland and accepted the offer to become the
chair of the School of Anglophone Cultures and Literatures at the Uni‑
versity of Social Sciences and Humanities where he has since been tea‑
ching students at postgraduate levels.
The decision was followed by he and his family moving to the
medieval city of Toruń where they live in an old apartment full of volu‑
minous furniture wherein books vanish constantly. Intellectual reflec‑
tion on the crooked matters of contingency and precarity, and their the‑
oretical implications for living and reading in the world, are happily
interrupted by a little gardening and biking, for which Toruń is well
suited. In Toruń TR also engages in the work of the academic commu‑
nity, particularly supporting the development of British Studies at the
Nicolaus Copernicus University (established several years earlier by his
late friend David Jarrett) and serving as head of the Anglophone Cul‑
ture Section in the Department of English (2007–2011), where he gave
lectures and seminars, took part in the organization of conferences and
co ‑edited collections of essays.
1 Now the Institute of English Cultures and Literatures.
inTRoduction
13
Presently TR divides his time between meditations on metaphysics
as a supplement of finitude (whose seemingly transgressive operations
contribute a great deal to the phantasmagoric nature of metaphysical
considerations) and poetics (as well as every ‑day practices) of care and
its power to overcome the deadly logic of ownership, appropriation and
domination. In his current research he also continues to explore the the‑
mes of precarity in culture, nature, wilderness, and the wild.
Essays included in this volume2 are written by TR’s friends, collea‑
gues and former students and bear witness to many intellectual affini‑
ties which can be shared, exchanged and enjoyed in mutual encoun‑
ters. Every one of these texts also testifies to the possibility of reciprocity
being materialized.
2 It has a companion collection entitled Affinities published concurrently by Peter
Lang Verlag.
A.P., S.M.
Redaktor
Michał Pelczar, Eric Starnes
Projekt okładki
Emilia Dajnowicz
Redaktor techniczny
Małgorzata Pleśniar
Łamanie
Marek Zagniński
Copyright © 2014 by
Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego
Wszelkie prawa zastrzeżone
ISSN 0208-6336
ISBN 978 -83 -8012-289-5
(wersja drukowana)
ISBN 978 -83 -8012-290-1
(wersja elektroniczna)
Wydawca
Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego
ul. Bankowa 12B, 40 -007 Katowice
www.wydawnictwo.us.edu.pl
e ‑mail:wydawus@us.edu.pl
Wydanie I. Ark. druk. 19,0 + wklejka. Ark. wyd. 19,5.
Papier offset kl. III, 90 g. Cena 36 zł (+ VAT)
Druk i oprawa: „TOTEM.COM.PL Sp. z o.o.” Sp.K.
ul. Jacewska 89, 88‑100 Inowrocław
Pobierz darmowy fragment (pdf)
