"Tertium non datur"? : wildness and methodology

Abstract

The choice of the paper for this volume has been largely limited by editorial requirements: the language of publication (English) and the original publisher (University of Silesia Press). In fact, this particular article would have been pretty far down the line of papers I would wish to have republished on this occasion — not because I consider it unworthy, but because there are other papers, both those already anthologized and more recent, which in a more direct way formulate my theoretical stance and, in my opinion, are more clearly identifiable contributions to literary studies. There are, however, reasons which justify the inclusion of “Tertium non datur?…” in the anniversary volume. The paper not only reflects my constant interest in methodological issues, but also — rather unusually on my part — combines methodological and theoretical considerations with actual analyses of literary texts (W.B. Yeats, Wisława Szymborska); it actually contains — which may be of some anecdotal interest — my own translation of a poem by Szymborska from the time before her Nobel Prize, when she was not yet a celebrity. The methodological stance of the argument is best epitomized in its closing sentence: “It is this wild terrain of the spectrum, which contests the tertium non datur principle, that I want to postulate as the area of our exploration.” From the theoretical perspective, this contestation of the tertium non datur foreshadows the concept of the Third, which I developed later, and which for some time became a subject of inquiry in the Institute, and also evoked more general interest in other centres in Poland (especially — and with mutual inspiration — among young scholars in the cultural studies department at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań). Still within the realm of theory, the paper in a prelim inary way focuses — via literary analysis — on the difference within (rather than difference between), which again became one of the leading motifs in my proposal for nomadic genre studies. Albeit brief, the article thus modestly prefigures some areas of my subsequent research. On a different note, what I personally like about it, is the uncovering of the paradoxical nature of the concept of the wild as the most tamed of all concepts, and, paradoxically again, as resisting the regime of duality through its own inherent self‑contradictoriness.