“Adam Mickiewicz and Humanism”: A+Lecture in literary studies
The fourth lecture of the new edition of the “A+ Lectures” Programme took place on 18 November 2021, Thursday.
The lecture titled “Adam Mickiewicz and Humanism” was delivered by Jörg Schulte - ordinary Professor for Slavic Literature at the University of Cologne.
About the researcher Jörg Schulte has been Full Professor of Slavic Literature at the University of Cologne since 2014.
He studied Slavic literature in Odessa, London and Hamburg, and obtained his PhD degree on the basis of his dissertation on the Jewish sources in the works of Isaac Babel, Bruno Schulz and Danilo Kiš. He held the Aby-Warburg-fellowship at The Warburg Institute in London and worked both as a lecturer at the College of Inter-Faculty Individual Studies in the Humanities (College MISH) in Warsaw, and as a network coordinator for the project ‘Russian Jewish Cultural Continuity in the Diaspora’, based
at the University of Bath. During the academic year of 2010/11, he was a visiting professor at the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies ‘Artes Liberales’ at the University of Warsaw. Between 2009 and 2014, he was an Honorary Research Associate
at the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies of the University College London (UCL). In 2016 he received the Jan Kochanowski prize of the International Association of Polish Studies. He is the founder and coordinator of the international double degree Master’s program “Cultural and Intellectual History between East and West”.
Jörg Schulte’s research interests include Jewish literature in Central and Eastern Europe, the survival of the classical tradition
in Hebrew, Russian, Polish and Serbian/ Croatian literature, the history of translation, and the history of prosody.
Abstract Although Adam Mickiewicz received an ideal humanist education, his attitude towards European humanism is intricate. His Paris lectures contained open and hidden, but also sharp polemics with the humanist tradition. Mickiewicz's search for the concept of Great Man, as sought for by Mickiewicz and exemplified, according to the author, by Kościuszko, stood in opposition to the humanistic idea of Man necessarily came in conflict with the humanist idea of man. The focus on the “human ideal” reveals the link between Mickiewicz’s poetic output and his lectures in Lausanne and Paris.
Moderator: Professor Adela Kuik-Kalinowska, Institute of Philology, Pomeranian University in Słupsk.
