7293648366

Dariusz Pawelec

From lullaby to laments

From the hermeneutics of poetic forms

Summary

The book includes interpretations of the poetic works from the second half of the 20^th century. The perspective of reading is de-termined by the meaning search initiated by traditional poetic and genre forms, such as lullaby, pastiche, occasional poem, turn to addressee poetry, confessions, elegies, and laments. The analyses cause verification of the ąuestions asked in the theoreticallitera-ry sketch opening the dissertation, namely In what way is histoń-cal poetics possible today? The assumption madę by the author consists in the perception of literary genres as “potentially exist-ing”, i.e. in the poems alone, in the literary practice. “The situ-ation of genres” in the second half of the 20^lh century is organized around the total lack of constraints, the borderline conditions at the level of the awareness of the participants of the process of literary communication. It means as well the lack of easiness in reading the meaning of the work. Thus, the ąuestions asked in the book concern the consistency of the contemporary “genre di-sintegration”, the horizon of endless semiosis. The place of bene-fits obtained from yet impossible system (taxonomy) was replaced with the proposal of levelling the genre with the “meaning possi-bilities”. Instead of systematicity, the author suggests semantics and hermeneutics of genres. Historical poetics presents itself in such a perspective as a discipline capable of historical observa-tions of the very changeability of factors generating meaning. The factors involve those genres or discourse types which, according to a certain intertextual perspective, being the part of a given “tex-tual organization” constitute “historical and social coordinates”. For example, Kołysanka (Lullaby) by Adam Zagajewski, apart form the effects of references to a traditional folk song, presents the mean-ings evoked by “history and memoiy discourse” confronted with

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