Agnieszka Pantuchowicz Orden de los libros

This book offers an interdisciplinary rethinking of the role of translation in the perception and reception of cultural texts. It also discusses human everyday discursive practices at the time of fluctuation of meanings and the decline of the authentic. The authors focus critically on the phenomenon of imitative replacement by all sorts of simulacra. The essays are addressed to literary and translation scholars as well as to all those interested in finding keys to understating the complex relationship between languages and cultures.

This book critically analyzes various means by which the authentic is searched for, staged, admired, dismissed, replicated or simply taken for granted. What is at work in such discursive practices is a poetics of imitation. This is seen as a paradoxical kind of poetics which renounces the authenticity of the created text.

Affinities, a collection of essays dedicated to Professor Tadeusz Rachwał, a noted literary historian and cultural critic, pioneer of the present-day cultural studies in Poland, includes texts written by his friends, colleagues, and disciples. As it turns out, even though the topics discussed by the particular authors differ from each other, the volume has a definite focus: literature and culture from the early modern times to the present, approached in ways that combine attention to the textual detail with a broad perspective of social change and the ability to use the hermeneutics of suspicion to see through various received ideas and petrified ideologies. Scholars from Poland, the UK, and the USA have demonstrated that Professor Rachwał attracts minds that unite critical passion and inquisitiveness with expertise in many fields of research in today’s (post-)humanities.