Na marginesach lektury : szkice teoretyczne

Abstract

On the Margins of Heading is a book in two parts, consisting of sketches and reviews of theoretical studies written and published between 2000 and 2005. In the first part, entitled On the Margins of Theory, texts constituting traces of a theoretical survey centred upon the French Poststructuralism are included. They have been the result of reading The Theory of Text by Roland Barthes, a sketch written in the form of an encyclopaedic entry to the French edition of Encyclopaedia Universalis. It was The Theory of Text that encouraged me to a series of survey and further reading, the result of which are the sketches discussed here. Almost each of them constitutes a direct or indirect reference to the text model presented by Barthes. His Theory of Text, in fact, is the core of the book around which particular sketches have been formed and the topics oscillate around the issues entailed by this well-known article. The Theory of Text becomes the theory of “postmodern” reading which is not confined to the literary text exclusively, but becomes reading of “real texts” surrounding us. The book opens with a sketch devoted to Tel Quel review and its basic assumptions, which were as much inspiring as disputable, I tried to take into account consistently being far from a sociological or value judgement. Further on, the Reader will come across a description of an apparently episodic history of Ferdinand de Saussure’s anagrams, which once inspired Roman Jakobson and contributed to a great extent to major changes in the definition of a poetic language (Julia Kristeva) and the theory of text itself. The case of de Saussure’s anagrams, once disregarded and, as a matter of fact, forgotten, seems to be especially important because it was this little-known area of linguistic survey that had a great deal of influence on the change of paradigm in the structuralist research of literary studies. What is more, I believe that it gives much room for any research focused on the issue of the “tonal organization” of the literary texts, at the same time revealing a variety of ways of the functioning of meaning within the scope of the artistic language. As a supplement to this sketch, I shall enumerate several works written by our domestic readers of de Saussure’s notes (Edward Balcerzan, Wincenty Grajewski, Władysław Panas), and make it clear that further research in this field is fully justified and worth developing on the basis what, for example, psychoanalysis entails. De Saussure’s research on anagrams also had an influence on the scope of the notion of “intertextuality”, which has experienced numerous modifications since it was created only to become, as its author claims, an ordinary “gadget” sneaking by the theoretical and critical studies. In the sketch devoted to this issue, I tried to recon structure the way of thinking about Julia Kristeva’s intertextuality which emerged from her subsequent books, starting with Séméiotikè to La Révolution du langage poétique. The three subsequent sketches concern Roland Barthes’ works. Here, I am trying to revel the rules of text construction, fascination with art, as well as various ways of its examination. In the end, I describe a text which apparently posseses all the features of autobiography, but, at the same time, tries to go beyond its traditional determinants to finally constitute the sum of both artistic and personal experiences of the author of The Theory of Text. I was trying to develop the theoretical issues discussed on the basis of the examples of text analyses so as not to be dominated by the “demon of theory”, (term by Antoine Compagnon) which is often hardly interested in the literary text as such, and its interpretations. The aim was not to illustrate or explain the complexity of theoretical issues on the basis of particular analytical examples, but show the way the theory can inspire various modes of reading of literary texts. The second part of the book — Theoretical Reading — is an account of critical reading of theoretical studies concentrated on the issues which are diversified and, at the same time, important for the literary studies to date. They involve such relations as literature and reality, literature and music, a hybridic text, the poetics of a novel. This part discusses those theoretical studies which have recently appeared in a domestic circulation of the literary studies, and offer many interesting and useful solutions from the point of view of the theory of reading and interpretation.