Affinities, a collection of essays dedicated to Professor Tadeusz Rachwal, 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...

This book addresses epistemological and political aspects of the discursive pursuit of authenticity and various ways in which the inauthentic is devalued and marginalized. The essays critically analyze 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 for the sake of its semi-religious offering to the origin. Such a divination of the Authentic posits...