Wholeness and disruption

Abstract

This essay examines how the poetry of the late Romantic Cyprian Norwid became a particularly appealing case for Polish structuralist analysis. Polish formalists, such as Manfred Kridl, laid the groundwork for a linguistic reading of Norwid. Two detailed analyses by Roman Jakobson (1963 and 1975 respectively) constitute the most radical expression thereof. Curiously, the Polish structuralists, such as Aleksandra Okopień-Sławińska and Michał Głowiński as well as the major German scholar of Polish literature, Rolf Fieguth, only very partially followed Jakobson’s model. As this essay argues, they struggled with the total analytic integration and rationalization of all elements of a given poem that characterizes Jakobson’s grammatical and phonetic approach. What unites the structuralist readings of Norwid is that all, in different ways, address the problem of wholeness as posed both by Norwid’s poems and his aesthetic thought. Under the auspices of reader-response theory, the notion of wholeness became increasingly problematic to the structuralist interpreters but was never abandoned altogether.