We wszystkich obszarach aktywności twórczej wyobraźnia, jest niezbędnym elementem w życiu i funkcjonowaniu człowieka. W wielu sytuacjach życiowych jest ona nieodłącznym elementem wykorzystywanym w sposób mniej lub bardziej świadomy. Pozwala tworzyć wyobrażenia, które nie mają odpowiedników w żadnym z wrażeń, stanowiąc podstawę twórczości wszelkiej aktywności człowieka. Wyobraźnia jest naturalnym przedłużeniem wzroku, specyficzną zdolnością do wywoływania obrazów, pobudzającą do twórczego myślenia i działania. W dzisiejszych czasach człowiek nieustannie bombardowany jest coraz większą ilością dźwięków i obrazów, które „zagłuszają” naturalny rozwój wyobraźni. Szybki postęp technologiczny, którego jesteśmy świadkami, nie pozostaje bez wpływu na rozwój twórczego myślenia, tworzy bariery ograniczające człowieka.

This article looks at Professor Stanisław Jaworski’s contribution to the development of textual criticism in Poland. It was his book I write, therefore I am that offered Polish readers a comprehensive and erudite introduction to French genetic and textual criticism. Published in 1993, it set this enormously important critical movement in the broader perspective of cultural and literary anthropology. The second part of the article examines the impact of this book on Polish studies into the processes of text creation and the ‘avant-textes’. The third, final part surveys the late Professor Jaworski’s role in organizing conferences and stimulating debate on all aspects of genetic criticism.

This is the first edition of Ola Watowa's unpublished journal written between 1955 and 1956. It covers a stressful period of in the Wats’ married life when, following Aleksander being diagnosed with a rare psychosomatic condition, the couple moved to southern France, where he sought relief from bouts of physical pain and mental anxiety. Ola's Travel Diary is a record of day-to-day struggles, despair, helplessness, and the restorative power of the creative process. This narration of a woman motivated by empathy and determined to make sacrifices to support her husband’s artistic career has the potential to inspire studies focused on that type of biography and the role of sacrifice in marriage.

The aim of this article is to show how Kazimierz Przerwa-Tetmajer depicts the creative process in his autothematic poems. The readings draw on the interpretative strategies of the theory of affect (primarily the work Ernst van Alphen, Teresa Brennan and Brian Massumi) and somatic criticism (e.g. Anna Łebkowska’s somatopoetics, Marta Smo-lińska’s ‘augmented haptics’). In the great majority of Przerwa-Tetmajer’s poems dealing with the process of poetic creation, we are told that it is triggered by an explosion of the affects or an overpowering divine inspiration, bordering on madness. The article ana-lyzes in turn the affective nature of the creative process and the affective perception of a work of art; the image of the artist as craftsman; and, finally, the image of the phantas-matic woman, a product of the act of creation.

This article is an attempt at a narrowly-focused application of a critical approach labelled ‘a history of the history of creativity’, formulated by Magdalena Popiel in her study The World of the Artist: Modernist Aesthetics of Creativity (2017). The article highlights the domain of autopoietic narratives – stories told by artists about their own creative performance, which involves projecting one’s own somatic identity and positioning one-self in a given socio-cultural context (community) – and examines the discursive dimen-sions of the creative process in the metanarrations of Tadeusz Peiper and Józef Czecho-wicz, two major poets of the Polish interwar avant-garde. The resulting model of the creative process is then set into the context of contemporary philosophical, anthropo-logical and psychological theories of creativity.

This study is an exploration of formal-aesthetic correspondences between presenta-tion strategies and techniques of transforming traditional literary and musical genre conventions in Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck. It takes as its bottom line William J. Entwistle’s distinction between re-creation and recreation (he used it in his appreciation of Don Quixote and so did Erich Auerbach) and his under-standing of art as an act of reproduction (re-creation) obliged to please (recreation). Seen from that perspective, both Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Berg’s opera “suffer” from ex-cess – overmuchness and surfeit with a tangible residue of melancholy. But it is because of these surpluses that these two works are regarded as masterpieces with continuing universal appeal.