Research goal
The aim of the project Sympotic poetics – from Antiquity to the present day is to investigate the phenomenon and topos of the symposium and its reinterpretation in modern culture, with a particular focus on the present day. The subject of reflection is both the classical realisations of sympotic poetics and the later references to them, fostering the construction of a particular type of discursive elitism.
Project description
In this project, sympotic poetics is treated as one of the dialogical strategies of initiating intellectual debates on visual arts and literature, fundamental in European culture. The research assumes that ancient symposia and related sympotic poetics are a tradition referred to by discussion groups from the Eranos circle as well as contemporary Polish artists – participants of ‘intellectual feasts’ gathered around Tadeusz Różewicz, Czesław Miłosz and Zbigniew Herbert.
Tadeusz Różewicz’s symposia, i.e. symposia feasts immortalised in the poet’s senile poetry and correspondence, occupy a special place in the research related to the project presented here. Różewicz’s senile works, in which a game is played with the literary convention of the symposion, and the convivial situation described in them is both reflective and ludic in nature, are subjected to interpretation and reinterpretation. Różewicz’s sympotic paideia and its culture-forming character also become the subject of research.
Activities undertaken as part of the project:
Organisation of the international academic session Les poétiques sympotiques de l’anitquité à nos jours, OMBEiK & PIAA, October 2023 (Joanna Hobot-Marcinek, Sebastian Borowicz).
Related publications:
J. Hobot-Marcinek, Sympozjony i misteria. Tadeusza Różewicza rozmowy o sztuce, in: Międzyliteratura jako przestrzeń dialogu. Studia dedykowane pamięci Profesor Anny Pilch, eds. A. Włodarczyk, S. Borowicz, K. Wawer, Kraków 2022.
J. Hobot-Marcinek, Eremici i sympozjaści: Ryszard Przybylski i Tadeusz Różewicz – listy, wiersze, rozmowy, „Prace Polonistyczne” 2022, nr 77.
J. Hobot-Marcinek, In vino veritas, in aqua sanitas. La poétique sympotique dans le poéme “tempus fugit…” de Tadeusz Różewicz, „Roczniki Humanistyczne” 2024:3.
S. Borowicz, Let us rejoice by drinking and talking beautifully: sympotic poetics as a function of culture, „Roczniki Humanistyczne” 2024:3.
