Dangerous Liaisons, Necessary Liaisons on the “Alternative” Ways of Reading Old Polish Texts

The Polish version of the article was published in “Roczniki Humanistyczne,” vol. 59 (2011), issue 1. The article Dangerous liaisons, necessary liaisons. On the “alternative” ways of reading Old Polish texts is a polemic with Agnieszka Czechowicz’s text Uwagi o przymusach metodologicznych w badaniach literatury staropolskiej (Remarks on methodological compulsion in studies of Old Polish literature), in which so-called “alternative” methods (Deconstruction, gender, etc.) of reading Old Polish texts are criticized on the basis of the assumption that they deform their true image. The present polemic uses a completely different assumption: there is nothing wrong in using methods coming from outside the context of the studied texts, for the works do not have a certain meaning in itself, but only an “osmotic” meaning. Textual “osmosis” is the almost infinite, but also limited by the semantic potential, openness of the text—not only to the contexts that the author foresaw, but also to the contexts that come from the commentator’s culture, and to whose existence the “alternative methods” may draw our attention.