The issue of subjectivity is raised in the theoretical and critical works on poetry authored by Barańczak, so to speak, marginally. Despite the fact, the issue of identity seems to constitute their core subject and is organically related to other relevant key threads such as, primarily, the issue of the “ethics of distrust”. Interestingly enough, the ambivalence of the situation of an individual, - placed somewhere between the individualistic and the community perspective - which is emphasized by Stanisław Barańczak by making rhetoric figure of paradox particularly privileged - is also expressed in the language in which the critic describes the problem. His observations come down ultimately to one thing: a consistent search in different writers for a confirmation of the assumption on the paradoxical nature and bi-dimensionality of human existence.
The articles derives from a conviction that the later essays writing of Stanisław Barańczak in one of its important aspects is a criticism of the morally destructive features of the language. His theory of poetry as a particular kind of speech – directed to the concrete, multimeaning, always individual – is a simple consequence of a conviction abot what should be the language in general results from the deeply ethical objection to the generality, exaggerated abstractness, one-sidedness of an opinion. Manifestations of such “a laying the language in charge”, to use Barańczak’s own words, I can be found mostly in his two late essays titled Człowiek, Który Za Dużo Wie [The Man Who Knows Too Much] and Poezja i duch Uogólnienia [Poetry and the Spirit of Generalisation]. In their rhetoric I am looking for the supplement of his relation to language.
The subject of the present paper is the rhetoric of paradox and irony in Stanislaw Baranczak’s late literary critical achievements. The paradox proves specially privileged rhetorical trope in his 1980s critcism and is used as an effective tool in describing problems of linguistic literary culture in the Polish People’s Republic. Irony, by contrast, is a basic mode of an essay dated 1990s which polemizes with standardised unilateral language of interpretation. The two rhetorical mechanisms turn out to be subject to the imperative of responsibility for the word – the context the author formulates for investigating their meaning. Moreover, the self-parodistic essay Who really were “the two steady gentlemen” or: the front of the fight for ifs, or: Slawinski finally amended encourage to question for a deeper sense of autoirony and “casting under suspicion” even one’s own critical language.
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