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Anthropology and literature. Several notes on inspirations from Poland

Publication at Faculty of Arts |
2017

Abstract

Opposed to Czech literary criticism, which draws inspiration from anthropological knowledge very reluctantly, contemporary literary criticism in Poland is barely thinkable without "an anthropological perspective". A great number of literary scholars claim that their "method" is anthropological.

Nevertheless, they do not always conceive it the same. The article examines three different ways of understanding the "anthropologization" of literary criticism: one of Ewa Kosowska, in which a literary work becomes a document or an illustration of non-literary reality; one of Grzegorz Godlewski which is greatly influenced by Mikhail Bakhtin as well as by postcolonial theories; and finally it examines works of Ryszard Nycz and his colleagues from the Faculty of Polish Studies of the Jagiellonian University whose often thought-provoking ideas do not often yield to an easy theoretical categorization.