History of Polish Literature (the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Baroque) WH-FP-I-1-HLPSrReB-W

Course contents:
The aim of the course is to acquaint students with the history of the Old Polish literature. Arrangement of meetings is strictly chronological:always there is a start from the historical context of these literary phenomena; their relationship with social and political life is shown. In the same way the student is introduced not only to the most fundamental issues of cultural material, but spiritual successive eras in the literature as well; there is also a task to reveal the relationship between literary phenomena, both those inner literary ones (history of the genres, a type of chronicle, song, epigrams, epic poetry, idyll etc) as well as external literary ones (the basic concept for the nobility). During the lectures the emphasis is put on historical facts, but also biographical roots of the literature (succession of generations, the ability to identify the phenomenon of "takeover" or "rejection" of tradition and artistic forms); the basic notions are introduced such as classicism, humanism of the Renaissance, Christian stoicism , horacianism, cyceronianism, tacytism, paranetyczność of the literature, Conceptismo, Sarmatism etc.
The lecture begins with the early medieval writings and ends with the work of epigones' writings of the Baroque literature: Fr. Józef Bace and Fr.Jędrzej Kitowicz. Its design axis is the index readings for students of the Polish language, support for this perspective is the Old Polish philology classes, where students have the opportunity to acquaint with the texts and to work with them. The lectures only suggest certain possibilities of interpretation.
The lecturer aims to "open up" an Old Polish for contemporary reading (but not to modernize it), to give a kind of paths of access to the literature, whose language is a bit incomprehensible today. A heremeneutic method is used, which assumes the life of the text in the act of understood reading (and more precisely: in the act of reading which seeks to understand).

Methods of assessment: credit not graded. The attendance at the lectures obligatory.