Poetics Through the Prism of Cultural Studies

Abstract

The article attempts to show the most important consequences of the process by which the methodological and epistemological foundations of modern literary theory have been dismantled, a process which in Polish literature studies has been characterized by a sweeping, yet often superficial assimilation of the radical conclusions issuing from two methodological turns—the Post-Structuralist turn and the cultural turn. One of the most serious consequences of this process was literature studies’ too easy renunciation of the separate status of its subject and scholarly apparatus, which occurred as a result of the cultural reorientation of the literary studies field. This led to the replacement of literary theory by a generalized cultural theory and the reduction of the literary text to the status of merely one of many equal subjects of cultural production practices. Against the background of modern literary theory, which now has become a purely historical phenomenon, poetics is revealed to be a discipline possessing not only vitality and expansiveness (a fact testified to by other fields’ appropriation of concepts and categories developed by poetics), but also indispensable to the continued life of culturally-oriented literary studies. For only poetics provides the tools that enable us persuasively to argue in favor of the separate status and specificity of literature as a form of knowledge and cultural expression of human experience which is in many ways privileged, standing out due to its specific formal and semantic properties, which make it a unique code for communication between and among human beings.