The article expands and modifi es the contexts in which literary onomastics currently operates. This strictly interdisciplinary field of research, primarily originating from linguistics, has sought out the contexts that triggered non-obvious meanings of names readable in the artistic work from the outset. The references were varied – stylistics, textology, philosophy, structural poetics. All of them significantly enriched onomastic analyses, leaving some fundamental sense of insufficiency at the same time. That is the reason why we propose the project of the connection between literary onomastics and — now extremely extensive — theoretical thought. The article is not the end of this discussion, but rather an exploratory study and the beginning of scientific research. Consequently, there is no one ordering and chronological concept with a clear conclusion, but the main aim is to show the analysis of the claims relevant for further research. Therefore, several concepts of theoreticians interested in proper names in literature were discussed (far from a common phenomenon in this case). From the research projects analyzed, including among others: U. Eco, J.F. Lyotard, P. de Man, there emerges a clear conviction of the need to end the search for a referential, texted name. In this place it refers, on the one hand, to itself, establishing its own unreal meaning (image-forming, phonic, intertextual); on the other, it concerns the author’s system of naming (and beyond), which is also an epistemological concept. The starting point of these diagnoses was the thoroughly interpreted self-analysis of artistic works made by Marcel Proust; for further analysis, the thesis of Walter Benn Michaels was also employed, which brings interest in proper names from literature to the domain of artistic experiences. The conducted analysis (designing future literary onomastic research) leads to the fi nal conclusion that the proper name indicates the essence itself, the arche of our existence.

This article presents a profi le of Stanisław Jaworski as a literary scholar with a life-long involvement in avant-garde literature. He defi nes the avant-garde as a mosaic of diverse trends with no common aesthetic or ideological denominator and, at the same time, as a transcultural network of artists apparently unrelated artists. Focusing on his major studies (Foundations of the Avant-garde, Tadeusz Peiper: Writer and Theoretician, Between the Avant-garde and Surrealism, and The Avant-garde) the article reconstructs Jaworski’s insights and theoretical constructs in the context of contemporary network studies and reassesses his commitment to both history and theory of literature.

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 article douments the impact of Kazimierz Twardowski's philosophy and scientific methodology on the criticism of literature and art criticism produced in Lwów between c. 1900 and 1939.