Kalekująca nowoczesność a literatura. Dialektyczne przygody u zarania polskiej modernizacji

The aim of the book is to use the analysis of literature created in the times of great transformations of the first half of the 19th century in order to look differently at the beginnings of Polish modernity and to report on its specificity resulting from the semi-peripheral modernisation that was at its origins.
The subordinated position within the world-system results in the modernisation of the semi-periphery already from its starting point, entering a different development trajectory than the one known from the central countries. It is characterised by the "coexistence of asynchronisms" and the tendency to give life again to forms and institutions that seemed to have already been transcended in the progress of history. In this sense, one can say – travesting Karl Marx – that the history of modernisation repeats itself twice: once as a tragedy, the second time as a farce. Since modernisation is the condition of possibility and the driving force of modernity as a broad cultural and social formation, the situation does not differ in the sphere of discursive struggles with the articulation of the new era. In Polish literature of the first half of the 19th century, we find a spontaneous dialectic of radical ideas of the modern breakthrough and ideas that are an anachronistic continuation of the pre-critical thought formation.
"Crippling" modernity is precisely modernity that, despite its objective limitations, such as the lack of an appropriate social base, well-established concepts or developed self-knowledge, boldly attempts to face the challenges of its era, even though, out of necessity, it often makes mistakes and reaches for ideological prostheses or anachronistic discourses. The interpretation of the work of the Polish Romantics proposed in the book presents them as witnesses of the turbulent birth of Polish modernity, and their works as a kind of experimental field where various ways of thinking about the specific modernity of the semi-periphery are tested. The beginning of modernity in Poland is a traumatic birth with all its problems, and not a delayed repetition of the path known from the center of history.


Interview about the book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPpFzTz_PBo

 

Wstęp / 7

Część I
Rozdział 1. Marks / 29
Rozdział 2. Nietzsche / 63
Rozdział 3. Weber / 97
Rozdział 4. Hegel / 111

Część II
Rozdział 1. Romantyzm: weltanschauung czy ideologia? / 135
Rozdział 2. Ontologie nowoczesności: o nowoczesnościach alternatywnych i zwielokrotnionych / 157

Część III
Rozdział 1. Trzecia część Dziadów wobec nowoczesności / 197
Rozdział 2. Krasińskiego Mickiewiczem / 261
Rozdział 3. „Energia to wieczna rozkosz”: Nie-boska komedia i egzorcyzmowanie fascynacji / 273
Rozdział 4. Mistyka polityczna / 331
Rozdział 5. Genezis z ducha, czyli o podmiotowości i naturze / 355
Rozdział 6. Witalistyczny tanatyzm Juliusza Słowackiego / 385

Zakończenie / 469
Bibliografia / 477
Summary / 497
Indeks osób / 503

Maria Janoszka

Kacper Kutrzeba