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Biblioteka Betel

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Kuligowski P.

Prace Filologiczne. Literaturoznawstwo

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2019

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issue 9(12) cz.2

127-141

EN

The essay starts with Borges and his unsurpassable account of the Library of Babel, interpreted as an ad hoc allegory of the humanistic erudition and its close affiliation with gnosis or, more precisely, its modern variety. The latter is conceived here as described by Eric Voegelin. The humanistic ideal of knowledge, in a manner of speaking, ‘immanentises the eschaton’ by the sheer fact of lending it a form, ‘visualised’ by Borges as the Library of Babel, a ‘gnostic’, inner-worldly equivalent of the Beyond. In a typically modern fashion, the Library replaces the mystics with aesthetics. The transcendental figure of Christ is reduced to an all-too-human figure of Narcissus. And yet, somehow, there is more to books than just words. By reading Ovid in the light of Plato, the essay penetrates and reflects the dual, ambivalent nature of the humanistic − or, shall we say, humane − pursuit of knowledge, gnostically ‘narcissistic’ and platonically ‘Christian’ at the same time. It is only then, at the close of the essay, that we are back with Borges: “Through this space [the Library] [...] there passes a spiral staircase which winds upward and downward into the remotest distance”. Deep within the periodically infinite Library of Babel, there lurks another one − the Library of Bethel − Jacobean, transcendental, surreal.

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Zbigniew Morsztyn spotyka Stephena Dedalusa

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Kuligowski P.

Prace Filologiczne. Literaturoznawstwo

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2021

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issue 11 (14)

315-333

EN

Originating from the concept of literature being total and timeless, the essay rereads Zbigniew Morsztyn’s Myśl ludzka [Human Thought] and a short passage from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The cosmographies identified in both texts prove to be not just allegorical maps of the human thought − a baroque and modernist one referred to as geocentric and egocentric one respectively but also reversed copies of each other. Joyce andMorsztyn independently discovered this ‘everything’ − a virtual content of the human thought, just as Augustine of Hippo had before them and described it in the tenth book of his Confessions. Both Morsztyn and Joyce figuratively described this microscopic substance of thought as infinite in Pascal’s terms yet, strangely enough, their descriptions are somewhat symmetrically reversed.

PL

Esej wyrasta z namysłu nad totalnością literatury − i jej bezczasowością. Stanowi próbę odczytania na nowo Myśli ludzkiej Zbigniewa Morsztyna i zarazem krótkiego ustępu Portretu artysty z czasów młodości Jamesa Joyce’a. Znalezione w obu tekstach kosmografie okazują się nie tylko alegorycznymi mapami ludzkiej duszy − odpowiednio barokowej (geocentrycznej) i modernistycznej (egocentrycznej) − ale też negatywowymi kopiami samych siebie. Joyce i Morsztyn, tak jak św. Augustyn w dziesiątej księdze Wyznań, znaleźli w swoich duszach „wszystko”. Obaj, w sposób figuratywny, opisali mikroskopijną zawartość myślenia jako nieskończoną w Pascalowskim sensie tego pojęcia − jakkolwiek ich opisy, o dziwo, są względem siebie jakby symetrycznie odwrócone.

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Śmierć w Nevadzie. Uwagi na marginesie ostatniej roli Johna Wayne’a

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Kuligowski P.

Studia Filmoznawcze

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2013

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vol. 34

51 - 78

EN

The essay seeks to analyse three seminal John Wayne films, namely The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and The Shootist, while its main theoretical aim is to conceive the apparent simplicity of Wayne’s acting technique and the striking similarity of his roles as resulting from the allegorical quality of the figures he had portrayed (and the generic features of the western film as such). This is not to say that the cinematic mystery is replaced with the pop-cultural form of the mere hermeneutic convention. On the contrary, the allegorical “John Wayne proper” (not to be confused with “John Wayne improper alias Duke Morrison”), when “shot to death” for the last time in his final The Shootist, turns out to be a highly enigmatic, if not “daemonic,” emblem of Justice, Truth and Courage, as eerily fathomless as the values he represents.

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2 Prace Filologiczne. Literaturoznawstwo

1 Studia Filmoznawcze

3 Kuligowski P.

1 2021

1 2019

1 2013

Biblioteka Betel

Zbigniew Morsztyn spotyka Stephena Dedalusa

Śmierć w Nevadzie. Uwagi na marginesie ostatniej roli Johna Wayne’a