“Additions” and the Category of Unity in the Poetics of Post-Stanisław Classicism

Abstract

The article deals with the theory of “epssodes” in Polish poetics in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. It offers an analysis of texts from the school of Post-Stanisław Classicism, containing guidelines concerning the introduction into a literary work of passages not connected to its main current, called digressions. For the purpose of creating a theory conditioning the functioning of these peculiar “additions,” an analysis of one of the basic aesthetic categories of that era, the category of unity, proves necessary. That analysis is connected with a theory of the perception of the work of art, popular at that time, with roots in Cartesian philosophy. Thus reflections on episodes and unity become a point of departure for testing current beliefs about the arbitrariness of classicist “rules.”