Resonance and Reception in Today’s Literary Studies

The theory of reception of literary works today delivers new perspectives for traditional issues concerning the role of a reader and od an aesthetically and sociologically defined audiences. The increasing importance of the “postcritical” attitude, modelled by the Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, raise new questions concerning distant, surface and deep reading, reformulations od hermeneutics of suspicion, and descriptive turn. The most powerful is the impact of Rita Felski’s proposal formed in Uses of Literature (2008), Limits of Critique (2015) and Hooked (2020), where “art and attachment” theory allowed to reevaluate the role of the mood, characters, interpretation and many other basic problems of the literary work’s composition and ontology.

The idea of the proposed set of lectures is to give the insight into the most updated debates concerning the literary reception and consider the possibility to apply it to the research of the international reception of the Polish literature. The lecture by an eminent world-class scholar Professor Rita Felski (University of Virginia, USA) will outline the most important changes in the theory of reception. The critic will discuss the important role of the “resonance” in her postcritical understanding of literature. The special attention will be paid to the sociological, networked ways of forming the resonance. Lectures by the professors of Polish studies in Italy and Brazil will allow to consider the possibility to apply this knowledge to the research of the international reception of the Polish literature. Prof.  Ceccherelli as a distinguished translator will describe the specific reception of Polish poetry in Italy. His lecture will reflect also on the powerful impact of the middle-brow Polish literature in the reception, which gains vast popularity in Italy now. Prof. Piotr Kilanowski is also the important translator of Polish literature and will describe the historical changes in the reception of Polish literature in Brazil. The goal of his lecture will also be to explain the importance of newly established institutions such as the Center for Polish Studies in Curitiba in active creating networks of readers.

The project will develop AMU’s research in the field of the theory of literary reception and AMU’s research of the international reception of the Polish literature.