We cordially invite you to the second Literature Seminar, which will be held in English, and will take place on Tuesday, 20th of February, at 5 pm in Kazimieras Būga auditorium.
This time the guest speaker will be Dr Patrycja Bąkowska from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. The topic of her presentation: Anthropological Projects of the Enlightenment – Searching for the Ways of Emergence of the Polish Modern Subjectivity.
Annotation. In the "long" 18th century, the fall of the Republic and the attempt to regain independence with Napoleon are the events of the greatest importance for the formation of modern subjectivity in the Polish variant. The members of the community, who found themselves without their country, must have had experienced uprooting which was painful for those who preserved the memory of the former splendour of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The devaluation of the strategies of "self-rooting" (a citizen as a free person maintaining control over his own life) created in the Old Polish period and interpreted in the Enlightenment) forced the community to apply compensatory mechanisms. One of them was the attempt to create substitute communities: Legion soldiers fighting for freedom and brotherhood, "feeling" friends (implementing the ideas of sentimentalism), and enlightened people becoming citizens of the world. Due to the abundance of literature dealing with these issues, the presentation will focus on the works of three authors: Cyprian Godebski, Józef Wybicki, and Kazimierz Brodziński. The works of the above-mentioned actors of political and cultural life, especially autobiographical ones, are interesting traces of the emerging paths of Polish modernity.
About the speaker. Patrycja Bąkowska – graduate of Interdisciplinary Ph.D. studies in the field of translatology and comparative Slavic literature and language at Adam Mickiewicz University (2019), assistant professor in the Department of Old Polish and Enlightenment Literature (2020 – present). Her area of interest is the literature and culture of the Enlightenment, with particular emphasis on transformations of anthropology, identity, and aesthetics. Her Ph.D. thesis was awarded by the Polish Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. She is also a laureate of the Foundation for Polish Science Monographs Programme: Formy ekspresji podmiotowości nowoczesnej. Tożsamość indywidualna i zbiorowa w poezji polskiej schyłku XVIII i początku XIX wieku (Toruń 2021) [The Modes of Modern Self-expression. The Individual and Collective Identity in Polish Poetry From the Late 18th to the Beginning of the 19th Century]. In 2022, she took part in the International Seminar for Early Career Eighteenth-Century Scholars organized by ISECS. She has published a number of papers in journals and chapters in books.
