Kulturalizm a teoria literatury. Znaniecki i Troczyński – miejsca wspólności

The article discusses the project of Konstanty Troczyński’s poetics theory within the framework of the history of cultural studies, not the history of literary studies. It is not Troczyński’s education in both Polish studies and sociology that justifies the suggested approach, but predominantly the fact that his concept was founded on transferring the theory of actions formulated by his master and friend Florian Znaniecki to the field of literary studies (which clearly distinguished this approach from other, better known – both then and now – approaches to literary theory from the 1920s and 1930s). Znaniecki claimed that the only sphere we can access cognitively is a cultural reality, which consists of meanings given to the world by people (the humanistic coefficient) and should be studied through analysing actions taken by members of specific communities. Troczyński thought literature ought to be treated as part of culture understood in this manner, and defined a literary work as a conscious creation of fiction, a result of artistic actions. According to him, the analysis of its form was the proper subject of poetics. By pointing out mental and geographic places of knowledge common to both scholars, it is possible to reconstruct the context of their unacknowledged commonality of thought which can be extrapolated to the new disciplines they practised, namely literary theory and sociology defined as one of sciences of culture, both of which emerged in Poland in the interwar period.