The aim of the article is to interpret Ignacy Karpowicz’s novel Balladyny i romanse in the context of romantic literature. The concept of romantic irony becomes the main theme and here in this article it distinguishes, in Karpowicz’s work, the aesthetic features that are characteristic of such romantic texts as Balladyna or Beniowski by Juliusz Słowacki. The contradictions that are characteristic of romantic irony in Karpowicz’s novel exist as a process of creating and destroying, where interweaving and complicating cultures and orders result in creating a chaotic but deliberate reality. The digressive character of the novel, metaliterary reflections and selfreference, reveal the author’s attitude to the creative process as an intellectual, romantic and ironic game.
The article tries to offer a reading of Borges’ fiction through the theory of romantic irony. First, it briefly outlines the “history of irony”, beginning with the approach of Plato’s Socrates, continuing with the late antiquity and its mostly rhetorical interpretation of irony as a means of expressing a thought through its opposite. The real focus of the article is the romantic irony, in particular the views of Friedrich Schlegel, who was one of the chief theoreticians of German romanticism. The reading of Borges’ short stories is attempted, the point of departure being two Shekel’s fragments that offer contrasting and complementary possibilities of interpretation. The first explains romantic irony in the context of the notion of chaos and possibility, the second draws on the concept of parabasis, known from the theory of Ancient Greek drama. The first interpretation tries to show Borges’ poetics as a poetics of possibility; the short story Library of Babel serves as an example. The second interpretation shows how the motives of waking up, creation and game can all be connected through the concept of parabasis and shows a group of Borges’ text, including some poems, that can be considered ironic in this special sense.
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