PI: dr Paulina Chorzewska-Rubik
Funding body: National Science Centre Poland / PRELUDIUM grant
Project time-span: 2023–2026
The main research objective is to analyze the output published online by Tomasz Pułka (who died in 2012) and compare it with printed works of the poet. The project responds to a significant gap in research on Pułka, i.e. a lack of a comprehensive, philological reading of his complete output and, in the case of a digital corpus, the need to address such basic issues as determining the sources. It is worth noting that Pułka is one of the key figures in recent Polish poetry, which is emphasized by both researchers and authors inspired by Pułka’s poetics. The expected effect of the project is to complete and re-evaluate the image of Pułka’s work and his creative practices. The source material analyzed in the project consists primarily of texts published online and available on public websites. The starting point for the research is to note that Pułka’s work is more extensive and meaningfully complex than the printed collected edition of his poems suggests. Pułka’s digital output includes 850 URLs and represents a much larger corpus than what can be found in the poet’s collection of printed works (4 volumes published during his lifetime, another 4 after his death, totaling over 300 poetic texts). The poems known from the volumes were also made available online in different textual, media, and communication variants, for example, as an excerpt from a blog entry or a post on a poetry website submitted to the community’s evaluation. From the proposed perspective of studying the sources, three main research questions emerge: 1) how can Pułka’s online works be characterized in terms of genre and subject matter? 2) what relationships do they have with his printed works, and how does the inclusion of online works in the studied corpus change the overall interpretation of his poetry? 3) what meaningful elements are lost in the process of transforming the successive text variants: from digital publications through publications in periodicals and books to collected editions?
The methodology selected is interdisciplinary and draws on the contributions of literary studies, media studies, cultural studies, comparative media studies, and studies of digital culture and history. The broadest general methodological framework consists of philology, genetic criticism, software studies, visual culture studies, and the research tradition of electronic literature. Key theoretical notions for my research are “platforms,” “interfaces,” and “computer code”; and for studying the printed versions – the “materiality” and “visuality” of the book, “bibliographic code,” and “paratexts.”