Böcker av Ryszard Nycz

The book is designed as a methodological exercise in cultural studies described as "engaging", which refers to a specific research approach requiring cooperation and the inclusion of individuals and communities in the research process, using a rich repertoire of humanistic traditions as a tool of social criticism. The key is to treat cultural studies as a workshop in which the researcher changes from a distant observer into a practical person - a public intellectual and craftsman at the same time. The turn from "engaged" to "engaging" research methodologies described in the book is strongly rooted in the tradition of the philosophy of praxis and the theory of social practices, from Aristotle, through Marxist theories, to contemporary participatory action research. Today, however, the practical approach in the humanities takes on particular importance in the context of the so-called ontological turn. The book tries to answer the question whether cultural studies based on the category of practice has a chance to be a new form of critical thinking under the conditions of post-anthropocentric humanities.

The book deals with what the author calls the new humanities: a broad and diversified front of orientations, directions, and turns grouped around five major currents: the digital humanities, engaged humanities, cognitive humanities, art-based research, and posthumanities. What links these approaches is their opposition toward the principles of the modern theory of humanistic cognition, which appears to be immaterial, external, impersonal, static, and neutral. Against this model, the new humanities posit a different type of cognition: embodied, penetrating the interior of the studied field, personalized (participatory), active (intervening), and situated (engaged). With this significant change, we proceed from the culture of disinterested observation, founded on the myth of contemplative view of the external world, to the real culture of participatory action, which is reconciled with the perspectivity and partiality of the subject's cognitive actions and which paves the way to reality from within and in its own right.

The author compares explicit statements on language by Polish Modernist writers such as Waclaw Berent, Boleslaw Lesmian, Stanislaw Brzozowski or Karol Irzykowski with notions deduced from their literary works. He demonstrates that these writers' linguistic self-consciousness informs and illuminates their implicitly self-reflexive texts.