Understanding Misunderstanding. Vol. 2: Artistic Practices

The authors of this volume have several research objectives. Foregrounding intercultural communication “failure” as an artistic device, Mikołaj Golubiewski shows that misunderstanding may be an effective means of self-creation and self-presentation. He analyzes these issues as an illustrious literary strategy of Czesław Miłosz. The eminent Polish poet established at least two different authorial personae, one in the USA and one in Poland. It enabled him to switch between the roles of a witness of history and a self-distancing medium of various personalities, voices, and masks. Michala Benešová, Dorota Michułka, and Małgorzata Zduniak-Wiktorowicz identify new forms of attributing and representing the perspectives of other cultures or members of sub-cultures. In her article on misunderstandings in Czech reception of Polish 21st century literary reportage, Benešová concentrates on cultural-cognitive barriers reflecting the differences in defining the genre’s characteristics, the position of the narrator, and the level of unfolding of his/her subjectivity within the original/translated text. The salient and perplexing problem of misunderstanding in negotiating cultural identities is addressed by Małgorzata Zduniak-Wiktorowicz. Within the framework of postdependence discourse, literary studies imagology, and the “philology of neighbourhood,” the author traces a significant asymmetry in the Polish and German cultures’ mutual- and self-assessment, both in literary representations of cultural differences and in literary historiographies. Literature is viewed as a uniquely revealing field of negotiating the state of non-/familiarization with neighborhood homeliness and otherness. What brings the two distant cultures together is, as the author argues, “the memory of a dissimilar past,” which needs to be thoroughly and evenly analyzed by both Polish and German researchers. In her article on contemporary Polish novels for young readers, Dorota Michułka analyzes misunderstandings as an element of inter-generational communication. She also discusses various narrative techniques that enable the reader to adopt different perspectives on the personal traumas of young protagonists. The author explores how the various cases of misunderstanding may strengthen the empathetic reading as an important social competence. Conflicts between the characters do not occur most commonly as an inevitable stage of adolescence, but they turn out to be an integral part of new social turmoil. Thus, Michułka names and describes the newly emerged social phenomena effecting interpersonal relations.

Magda Nabiałek analyzes misunderstanding as an element of contemporary Polish drama poetics. What is especially important in the study is the case of representations of the Second World War. The author distinguishes a particular mode of representing the Holocaust: Nabiałek labeled this strategy “a laboratory of failed story-telling”. The very act of communicative failure inscribed in a drama indicates that war trauma can neither be told nor shown to the post-war generations.

In the domain of literary criticism, Eliza Kącka examines the intentionally and methodically constructed misreading of an innovative modernist literary work. Kazimierz Wyka and Stefan Napierski’s severe criticism of Bruno Schulz’s Sanatorium pod Klepsydrą [Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass] is conceived as a model of intentional misunderstanding of an unquestionable novelty in literary culture. Uncovering the system of tricks used to misunderstand Schulz’s stories, Kącka confirms that misunderstanding needs to be considered as one of the bases of literary communication, and a necessary constituent of the social framework of reading. The two critics’ attack on Schulz, nevertheless, exerted an unexpectedly positive impact on the development of the world’s “schulzology”. Katarzyna Lisowska proposes a slightly different perspective on cultural misunderstanding in interpretation practices. She presents an in-depth analysis of the reception of the life and output of a highly controversial Polish writer, transgressing gender and social norms: Maria Komornicka/Piotr Włast (1876–1949). Lisowska discusses two multifaceted projects of reinterpreting and re-using Komornicka’s/Włast’s history adopted by two scholars and writers: Izabela Filipiak and Brigitta Helbig-Mischewski. This article focuses on some aspects of the latest queer criticism studies, feminism and gender studies and, last but not least, literary criticism.

The analytical material has been restricted here to the history of Polish literature, Polish literary criticism and theoretical discourses. However, given the variety of the selected studies and their “laboratory” character, the conclusions could be applied to other national literatures and literary studies. The enormous subject of misunderstanding as a mode of cultural creativity remains open to correction, revision and improvement by comparative literature scholars in many sorts of research projects.

The two-volume collective monograph Understanding Misunderstanding is one of the publications commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences (1948–2018). The editors express their gratitude to the Institute authorities for co-funding the publication.

The editors of the monograph would like to express sincere thanks to its reviewer, Prof. Witold Sadowski (Institute of Polish Literature, Warsaw University) whose sustained counsel and incisive methodological suggestions have helped to complete this monograph in its present form.

Within the monograph all the quotations from literary works of art appear both in the original form and translated into English. Cited fragments from critical and scholarly texts are given in both language forms only if the original shape of the quote is of special importance for the presented analyses.