Dorota Michułka

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1. Introduction

“An excerpt (fragment) is a small piece or a part broken from something whole, published separately, for instance, in an anthology, periodical or florilegium (or miscellanies). It is also a bit of the unfinished whole, publicized posthumously or during a writer's life (e.g. Żeromski described All or Nothing as a fragment).”³ In her Fragment Romantyczny (The Romantic Fragment), Anna Kurska discusses another meaning of the word fragment. The author concludes that a fragment is one of the fundamental literary forms developed by the Romantic literary school (of A. W. Schlegel, F. Schlegel, Novalis, F. E. D. Schleiermacher) and that it can be characterized as “a short piece, written in prose, that lacks a compositional discipline; usually conveying the contents of the movement's manifesto with an appropriate form of expression, equipped with individual stylistic values.” Because of its incompleteness, a fragment, was supposed to be the most spontaneous and authentic expression of creative tensions. Literary pieces of that kind were announced in the periodical Athenaeum. The category of fragment played a significant role in the Romantic poetics, associating itself specifically with a drive towards the “open form.”⁴ By virtue of making use of “a part dissected from the whole of a literary work” in the Polish language education, in this paper, we shall be interested in the first meaning of the word fragment, only.

The whole that is imposed on a (literary) fragment is for instance an anthology of texts designed for didactic purposes. It may be an anthology of texts that represent a particular point of view, for example, descriptions of landscapes (e.g. J. Kobuszewski's Spaces and Landscapes, or I. Sikora's Lilies, Roses, Tuberoses. The Symbolic Representation of Flowers in the Poetry of the Young Poland) or a collection of fragments with humorous values. It may also be an anthology of genre (e.g. The Anthology of Polish Fable by W. Woźnowski). The completion of a fragment often takes on a specific character of representing the whole text as the element typical of it or as a synecdoche-like pars pro toto (a more general or a more specific meaning than usually is assigned to a literary excerpt used for didactic purposes)⁵, e.g. the narration of the duel between Achilles and Hector in florilegia is at the same time a presentation of the homeric style and a synecdoche, or an equivalent, for the entire heroic epic.⁶ In the collection of Eksplikacje literackie (trans. The Literary Explications), the interpretations of excerpts from the Illiad or The Song of Roland (La Chanson de Roland) function in a similar way. To give an example, in the Illiad - the description of Achilles's shield⁷, and in The Song of Roland - the death of Roland⁸ have such functions. Those excerpts taken from longer texts and selected for educational purposes arrange themselves in some sorts of collections: anthologies, florilegia, reading books.

2. School Anthologies

Let us begin from anthologies. On the whole, attitudes concerning the nature of an anthology are positive. To illustrate, an anthology is said to be “the selection of most beautiful literary excerpts”⁹ “the collection of the most beautiful monuments of literature,”¹⁰ and “the collection of valuable literary pieces.”¹¹ Undoubtedly, the aforesaid opinions are connected with the etymology of the Greek word anthology: anthos, meaning “flower,” lego, meaning “I gather” (hence anthology means flower gathering). The Greek literature offers the following collections of epigrams: “Safona's roses,” “Anyta's sword lilies” or “Moiro's white lilies.”¹² In his “O antologii edytorskiej” (“On Editorial Anthology”) Bednarek maintains that figuratively, “flowers” were not only used to denote entire literary works (or excerpts taken from them), written in accordance with the accepted canons of beauty, but also works which were significant for reasons of their philosophical, religious or moral contents, e.g. The Little Flowers of St. Francis of Assisi, buddhic - The Great Book of Flowers.¹³ Stefania Skwarczyńska discusses an anthology in genologic categories. She approaches it in terms of the silva form considering “two factors in contrast with each another: varietas and the rules of consequence governing the selection of literary pieces.”¹⁴

“An editorial anthology can be considered as such, if it is preserved in the form of a published collection of texts (or its fragments) a) of one or many authors, b) comprising at least two elements (a minimum necessary for an occurrence of an intertextual relation)¹⁵, c) formed as the result of choice, that is, based on the appropriate criteria, a transition from a wider to a narrower scope, d) determined by the editorial metatexts as a deliberately organized whole.”¹⁶ An anthology (whose perpetrator is an editor) stipulates the status of a work included in the anthology. Its status is, naturally, different than the status of a work not included in an anthology.

The freedom of delimitationalist-reductionist actions is limited by: semantics of a work that determines only certain possibilities of separating the coherent meaningful wholes, and often also socially preserved means of evaluating some literary facts (e.g. the collection of fragments, extracted from Mickiewicz's dramas cannot lack the Great Improvisation).¹⁷

However, not all anthologies specify the criteria concerning the selection of works or its fragments. There is, for instance, An Anthology of the Most Felicitous Polish Literary Pieces edited by W. Bełza (Warszawa 1884)withouta subtitle. It is worth emphasizing, nevertheless, that the following criteria: composition, direction of the reading process, bibliological organization of publications, systematize an anthology. Thematic, national, linguistic, generic, authorial and other idiosyncrasies dominate. These rules are decided on by an editor. In order that the reader (the addressee) could properly read the communicational intentions of the editor, “a bibliological delimitation of an anthology (inter alia methods of the “technical” designation of the limits of texts, tomes, volumes) should maximally correspond with the content-related organization of texts.¹⁸

3. Florilegia and Texts

Besides formalist-artistic and communicational aims in school anthologies, instrumentalist-pragmatic goals are dominant. Some texts or fragments assume a form of extremely functional genres, that is, texts.¹⁹ The collection of texts were characteristic for the XIX century education. Those texts were investigated in schools of autonomous Galicia because a large number of handbooks and miscellanies were published in the Polish language. Series of schoolbooks were titled “books for reading” and they were bound for pupils from the second grade onwards.

This phenomenon was described by Mieczysław Inglot in his works: Gatunki i rodzaje literackie w galicyjskich podręcznikach do nauczania języka polskiego w szkołach elementarnych i niższych klasach gimnazjalnych (Galicja doby autonomicznej) and in O czytance w galicyjskich podręcznikach dla niższych klas szkół elementarnych i idem. The great majority of collections of texts for Galician schools had a function of florilegia.²⁰ As Słownik języka polskiego (Dictionary of the Polish Language) provides, florilegium (wypis) is: “a collection of excerpts (or fragments) of literary pieces, written in a commentatorial mode etc. intended to be read in schools.”²¹

Because of a multiple number of publications, it is worth to point out the following Galician schoolbooks: J. Czubek, R. Zawiliński - Wypisy polskie dla klasy III szkół gimnazjalnych i realnych, Lwów 1893, A. Dzieduszycka, W. Seredyński - Wypisy. Przykłady i wzory form prozy i poezji polskiej. Książka do czytania dla użytku średnich zakładów naukowych żeńskich, Kraków 1881, K. Mecherzyński - Wypisy polskie dla szkół żeńskich z najcelniejszych pisarzy krajowych, Kraków 1875.

The titles suggest that what we are dealing here with are florilegia for specific types of schools (male, female), florilegia for specific level of education (gymnasia, “real schools”), florilegia consisting of specific genres (and literary types or forms), for example, written in prose or poetic florilegia, or florilegia calling up the works of the most prominent Polish writers (on Macherzyński's view, “the most prominent Polish writers” are: Mickiewicz, Kochanowski, Pol, Lenartowicz). Polish writers, excerpts of whose works were included in the Galician schoolbooks over the period of 1867 through 1914, made up a canon consisting of 39 names. Considering a number of reprints, Mickiewicz came in first (130), Wincenty Pol came in second (108) and the subsequent places were held by Jachowicz (79), Krasicki (76), Lenartowicz (54), Konopnicka (52), Sienkiewicz (50). Słowacki (25 reprints) held a distant 18^th place and Krasiński (15) 25^th place. As Inglot's frequency list makes evident, over the period of autonomous Galicia, it was predominantly Romanticism that made the running (18 names and 654 reprints), then the Enlightenment (254 titles), then Positivism, followed by Renaissance and the Young Poland.

The criteria that governed the selection of texts for schools in that time were considerably diverse and they resulted from certain didactic assumptions made by pedagogical milieux in autonomous Galicia. We may talk, for instance, about a phenomenon of 'accustoming' Romanticism in accordance with a few principles. A paramount principle was the principle of nativeness and familiarity. It was understood as a reference to the native national tradition, and in our case - the Sarmatian tradition (for example Pan Tadeusz prepared at that time in fragments for school usage, becomes an idyll) and the most important thematic spheres that were distinguishable in Romantic works having the status of obligatory reading (oftentimes texts in school readers) in Galician schools were: 1) the sphere of childhood (a house and its closest surrounding), 2) the beauty of the fatherland (nature), 3) the Polish people, its games and customs (the ceremonial year), 4) religion (a great deal of attention was paid to the power of a child's prayer), 5) history (anthologies of historical texts whose protagonists were national heroes - kings and leaders, oftentimes canonized on the model of saints), or 6) the issue of social solidarity (e.g., in Pol's 'school' production).

Romantic literature for schools was deprived of revolutionary and patriotic elements. The knowledge about Polish literature was shaped through reading excerpts of texts (also called school texts), prepared specifically for this purpose, taken from literary works, specifically, from moral-didactic contes or novellas which tought the conduct in the world.²² The well-known series are: Czytanki historyczne dla ludu (J. Maternicki, Świadomość historyczna społeczeństwa XIX wieku), Czytanki, and also Florilegia for schools often printed in the issues of “Czytelnia dla ludu i Młodzieży” or “Macierz Polska.”

The works of J. Kobuszewski concerning “values” in the Galician schoolbooks are of a particular interest. Touching upon the question of the “educational ideal,” the author discusses a knightly ethos, religiousness, virtuousness and diligence. “The axiology [in schoolbooks] bears fruit in the form of national-religious patriotism, traditionally comprehended as the ideal of work and the classicist aesthetic ideal.”²³ However, in his article: Kanon symboliki narodowej i społecznej w galicyjskiej edukacji polonistycznej (na podstawie podręczników i wypisów), W. Dynak writes about the problem of “loyal servility in the handbook-text form... reading books intended for Galician schools taught love to two fatherlands: Austria and Galicia.”²⁴ “In the Austrian fatherland - Dynak argues - the land of fair and full of goodness patriarchism, the rich and beautiful land - Arcadia” - there prevails “the cult of kaiser” - Rudolf Hapsburg - the founder of the house of Hapsburg, and later, Francis Joseph - “the good father.” Galicia, however, was shown through the phenomenon of “symbolic equivalence” that is to make the reader think through images and through calling up notions from the scope of the history of Poland and national consciousness (Kraków, the Zygmunt Bell of Wawel Cathedral, the Tatra mountains, the Church of St. Mary, Jasna Góra; “the language of political names was substituted with a symbolic convention of ethnic and regional names, e.g. ”the River Vistula is “the queen of Polish rivers.”²⁵ The Galician schoolbooks and florilegia for teaching literature “seem to be, from today's perspective, unusually coherent and consequent reservoir for the representation of the ideology of social solidarity,” and the interpretation of texts is concentrated around the key-words: house (noble backwoods and a rural cabin), God, work (the symbol is farmer's - plougher's or harvester's - hardship), child - orphan.²⁶ The considerations concerning the selection of texts and excerpts of texts for schools, in the period of autonomous Galicia, demonstrate that the ways of 'preparing' literary works or excerpts for a school usage was exposed to the didactic machinery. The contents of the florilegia were, then, ideological.

Also, similar and deliberate transformations of texts (or even bowdlerizations of texts) used in the Polish language teaching concern contemporary literature, written after 1945. The post-war florilegia and textbooks for the literature classes, in fact, do nothing but mirror the socialistic reality. There are many examples of such manipulations.²⁷ In Literatura współczesna “źle obecna w szkole,” Bożena Chrząstowska, touched upon the issue of prohibited literature discussing creations of many writers. To give examples: Miłosz's creation in exile, Andrzejewski's Gates of Paradise (excerpts: Robert's confession, Jakub's confession), fragments of Gombrowicz's Journals from 1953 through 1956, The Diary (an excerpt On Censorship) by Jasienica, fragments from Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (Winston corrects Big Brother or the role of Newspeech), Lipska's Immigrant's Confession, Warłam Szałamow's The Story of Gydan, (fragments: The Red Cross, Packed Lunch), Gustaw Herling-Grudziński's Journal Written at Night (fragments concerning Sołżenicyn, Mandelsztam and Szałamow, Bicie w bębny narodowe - an account of Gierek's days).

In the introduction to the same volume, Chrząstowska emphasizes the role of Glosariusze (The Glossaries) in the education of the eighties - the auxiliary materials for the Polish language teachers, published in the unofficial circle from 1986 to 1989 and edited by T. Patrzałek. She concludes:

It may be dubious or questionable to publish fragments from fabular prose - one must read the book in its entirety, not in fragments. The whole and the fragment play, however, different roles: firstly - not all texts suggested in the new curriculum are available in the market in sufficient quantity, so it is better to read a fragment than nothing, secondly - fragments from prose make it possible for a teacher to carry out a reliable analysis (or an explication) with an already available text, thirdly - an interesting fragment may encourage the reader to read the book in its entirety.²⁸

4. An Excerpt (Fragment) as Suggested Reading

Let us get back to textological considerations. We could indeed talk about the delimitation of texts on the semantic level (here, semantic figures and levels are the appropriate spheres for the coherence of a literary text in which an important role was played by the historicoliterary localization of the text, e.g. the description of the noble manor in Pan Tadeusz as an example of the Romantic excerpt). A text in the Galician florilegia seems to be a complete communique with a prevailing theme (e.g. a house), or a particular theme-rhyme structure²⁹ (e.g. the legend about King - Kazimierz Wielki).

For school florilegia we can then select “fragment(s) as a phenomenon oppositional to the whole in the sense of a literary piece” (e.g. descriptions of nature and the noble manor in Pan Tadeusz suggest reading this national epic through the prism of an idyll), and include a fragment “whose understanding” indicates an incomplete or partial sense. The partiality of fragment usually denotes its liaison and dependence (e.g. Pieśń Wajdeloty (The Song of Wajdelota) or Opowieść Wajdeloty (The Story of Wajdelota) as a fragment of Konrad Wallenrod) or a fragment functioning with the literary work or independently of it (e.g. a fable about Janek Who Sewn Shoes For Dogs interpreted in the context of Kordian or indepentently).

Due to such operations of “taking out” the excerpts from a text, we get peculiar wholes derived from the original whole, which means, that a fragment can also function outside a literary work.³⁰ Another operation would have to do with drawing, from the original whole, only those fragments which are facultatively separable, e.g. poems (in contemporary literary school appendices there are Norwid's poems drawn from the series of Vade mecum or single sonnets from the series of Crimean Sonnets) and also, drawn from structural and semantic wholes, descriptions or profiles (Wokulski's or Izabela Łecka's profiles), and specifically discursive texts restrained within the confines of nondiscursive texts (e.g. fragments of Fredro's journal Trzy po trzy). Now, to make the whole from what-is-not-the-whole - but a fragment - is predominantly about repeating the same operation of dissecting that allows for semantic and structural factors. A significant role, however, connected with this operation plays an assignment of, different than initially, literary conventions to a fragment, making it a new structure and giving it a slightly different meaning...³¹

Bartoszyński writes about it referring to Rajan's work The Form of the Unfinished. English Poetics from Spencer to Pound.³² Bartoszyński quotes (after Rajan) “a fragment is something less than the whole and something different than the whole.”³³ Let us give an appropriate example:

Beniowski's passus, starting with words “God, who has not felt you...” within the confines of a poem is an apostrophe governed by the rules of “high poetics,” once it has been marked off, it is subject to the rules of a certain lyric change, at the same time, however, its sense gets somehow greater assertive power. Further problems of making it once again the whole, start from the moment of including an isolated fragment in the alien whole, in the form of a quote... [i]t is connected with the modification of the meaning and function of different layers of the text exposed to such an operation, e.g. the beginning of text written by Maria Malczewski - “Lo, you, on the fast horse” quoted in Beniowski's song number V has an original character of a rhetorical question, typical of the beginning of a Romantic poem. In Słowacki, however, the same text, connected with the beginning of Opowieść Wajdeloty, quoted in a slightly modified form, referred to as “the work of the bard from a neighboring province,” together with an implicit remark to a humorous nickname of a provincial writer Placyd Jankowski gets the character of a humorous attack on the backwardness of Polish literature.³⁴

Considering the question of a literary fragment that becomes the suggested reading in school, we enter the sphere of issues of literary communication. It is a problem in the research of social pragmatics of literature. As Dynak asserts, “the social status of literature in the process of literary communication in school ... is conditioned by institutionally programmed and empirically practiced editorial operations.”³⁵

There come the following questions, then:

first - Which excerpts from literature do we select for schools?,
second - How do we make that choice?,
third - What are the criteria that govern that selection?

On Piotr Chmielowski's view in Metodyka historii literatury polskiej:

The scope of cognition of authors and their works may be different, depending on the intention whether a student wants to get familiar with the development of literature in the most important periods (cf. Głowiński's theory of “history of 'selected' literature”) or also in less important, second-rate periods; or whether he or she wants to acquaint with the creation of authors as a whole, or only with what was typical of that whole. In the former case, they will need collective publications of works, in the latter - historicoliterary florilegia.³⁶

In schools, however, it was not a pupil that decided on the selection of texts (readers) to be discussed, even though it was the intention of positivist teachers. Such readers often included historicoliterary introductions, fragments from literary pieces (oftentimes according to rhetorical rules), editorial comments and explanations of particular excerpts and also synopses of the whole works with interpretations that would - “make it easier for the reader to understand and delve into the core of the piece being deconstructed.”³⁷

From 1899 through 1917 there had been several publications of very popular schoolbooks (designed practically for the pupil) on the subject of the history of Polish literature by the brothers Mazanowski.³⁸ At the turn of the century, in the communicational school circle, these schoolbooks provided “the three paradigms of: ideological, moral and stylistic norm.”³⁹ Such florilegia and schoolbooks were often the only source of systematic knowledge about the history of national literature. They were also the material for teaching poetics and stylistic. Próchnicki maintained:

Those are wrong who in regarding the content of verbal things - connected with comprehension of readable works - as the aim of education, would rather fill school readers with diverse contents so that they would enrich the pupil's knowledge in many disciplines during the Polish language classes. The ability to read in the native language is, however, the aim in itself and it does not need to serve any other discipline. If variety in florilegia is necessary, it is not to make the youth absorb knowledge from different fields, but, on the one hand, not to tire a juvenile mind with monotonous material, and on the other hand, make it possible for the student to learn about the richness of the language in different fields of human knowledge.⁴⁰

Fourty years later, at the time of the fiery discussion concerning editions of literary texts for schools, Kazimierz Wóycicki in his Rozbiór literacki w szkole. Podręcznik dla nauczycieli, took note of “taking the reader (student) beyond the text, which would shape his or her psychological and social interests and would lead to a historicoliterary synthesis.” Wóycicki also emphasized “quoting most important excerpts that help determine the origin of the literary work, exhibit author's judgment on the work, or illustrate contemporary readers' opinions about the work.”⁴¹

Do not contemporary collections of literary fragments serve a similar function in “reading comprehension” drills? One of the best anthologies of literary fragments for school is the series of explications titled Lekcje czytania. A method of literary explication (explication de texte), as a way of associating with a text, is the method of literary criticism, but there is also some didactic aspect to it. In the scope of literary education, the method could be described and placed against the background of various other methods, curricula and goals of the subject. And to achieve these goals one could also make use of Chrząstowska's work Poetyka stosowana or Lektura i poetyka.⁴² Against the background of the XX century tradition of work with a text in the Polish language education - argue Dynak and Labuda - a new element is emphasized in the method of explication (it was new in the 90's when Lekcje czytania were first published) - reading, “which is the point of departure and the point of arrival: the whole method is focused on teaching (and facilitating) the art of reading. In school, it is necessary to read a lot and to read carefully. In the thicket of literary pieces read in school, one should seek out texts which deserve common and thorough reading.”⁴³

A selected piece or excerpt should then “delight the teacher with its beauty since one can hardly speak with conviction about things which do not move us, [it] should be cognitively rich and valuable in education.” Also, it should not be easy in reading (time also plays an important role, we only have 45 minutes hence a mechanical limit of 30 lines). In the process of explication, an excerpt is “always closed and independent compositional entity as e.g. a description, portrait, monologue, scene, episode. These are the small wholes that we distinguish in the compositional analysis of an epic, drama or a longer lyric. The selection of this or that whole is, however, governed by aesthetic, cognitive and educational criteria, which are taken into account on selecting the literary piece. Moreover, it is also worth making an effort to find such a selection of a literary work which at the same time would be its key point, namely, in which all important ideological episodes or typical artistic features come together, e.g in Reduta Ordona the limits of compositional components do not conform to the author's topographical division, which was, in an excellent manner, proved by Wyka.⁴⁴ According to these limits, when looking for a fragment for explication, a poem must be divided because each component carries a relatively independent portion of sense and serves its own function in the entirety of the poem.”⁴⁵

The process of explication is completed through a thorough study of text. To give some appropriate examples, the death of St. Alexy (the fragment from the Legend about St. Alexy), the description of the Polish state (the fragment from Gall Anonim’s Chronicle), The grotesque Hunter (the episode from Rozmowy Mistrza Polikarpa ze śmiercią - Master Policarp’s Talks with the Death), the Fatherland as the Ship (from Piotr Skarga’s Kazania sejmowe - Parliamentary Summons), Before the Adventure of the Windmills (from Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes), the Freedom of the Individual (Jacques the Fatalist and His Master by Denis Diderot), the Ball (the fragment from Guy de Maupassant’s The Necklace), The Gilded Landscape, the description of harvest (from Nad Niemnem - On the Banks of the Niemen by Eliza Orzeszkowa). The editors of the volume conclude:

a person who on the basis of an excerpt intends to characterize an entire literary work, or who, based on a small sample of text, wants to present the poetics of the trend or the rules of genre, misses one’s aim.

But when an excerpt is the subject of explication - a scene extracted from a drama, an episode from a novel, a fragment from an epic - then, the necessity of getting familiar with the entire work is obvious. In order to understand the internal sense and structural functions of that excerpt, we must be able to localize it in the entire work and establish thematic and constructional relations of that fragment with what precedes it and with what follows... The model of teaching literature in the XX^th century - no longer rhetorical and criticoliterary - emphasizes reading, which is a soundless activity - and excluding special cases - not externally affirmable. The school must teach the ability of expression, it must also check what the student read and how he read it ... The twentieth-century textbooks and lists of suggested reading include literary epochs, trends, genres rather then single texts ... The school expects the student to produce criticoliterary statements, but it does not offer any patterns of criticoliterary expressions. To some extent, this gap is filled with literary explication.⁴⁶

Labuda and Dynak who worked out this method for schools, took note of the speech act function and pragmatic function of an uttered text - an intended aim (result) - that the speaker achieves.

A pragmatic meaning of an utterance can be easily grasped against the background of the contextual situation (lyrical, narrative or conversational) when we are able to imagine the circumstances in which the utterance could be produced and the addressee of that utterance. An agent of a literary utterance sometimes “seeks” an interlocutor in a real reader, sometimes, however, he turns to someone in a fictional space of the literary work. The reader becomes a witness of somebody else's conversation,⁴⁷

and attempts to specify a pragmatic sense of that fragment, names the intention of the utterance: accusation, admonition, deception, amusement, tease, consolation, etc. All these literary operations made on a fragment come into the scope of analysis and interpretation of a literary work and send to this work.

To sum up the textological discussion as regards the editorial fragment, let us once again quote Bednarek, who Little Prince which concerns the issue of domesticating a fox.

For a few years now, (particularly in the last two years), we have observed a practical introduction of reading comprehension exercises to schools. Often, these collections of texts are small studies on the border of belles-letters and utilitarian texts. And, in fact, they become more and more instrumental in their nature. At present in the claims that:

depending on certain communicational goals, a reference of the editorial fragment to the work... allows to distinguish three types of fragments: a) a fragment for which the crucial point of reference is the work from which it was extracted (with a broadly understood context of the work, e.g. literary explication) b) a fragment for which the crucial point of reference is the whole different than the work, e.g. the use of a particular literary topos or touching upon certain type of issues, e.g. utterances concerning love and death, c) a fragment (specifically: a foreshadowing fragment),⁴⁸

for which - depending on the main text of a book - the crucial point of reference can be the work or the whole different than the work. This third type of fragment, usually found on a jacket flap, is particularly significant for educational purposes and serves very important communicational functions: it may advertise a given book, it can be a programmatic text, representative of the creation of a certain writer or subject matters (character) of an anthology (collection), e.g. in the selection of Saint-Exupery's creations, there appears an extract from The Polish language education (on different levels of teaching), fragments extracted from extensive texts are used for accomplishing various types of mental operations. There is even the valid list of operational verbs which on the level of memorizing information (on the level of “knowing”) are as follows: name, define, list, identify, enumerate, but on the level of understanding the message of an instruction are: summarize, explain, illustrate, differentiate, and on the level of ability (competence) in the application of knowledge (information) in typical situations (“to shape”), the list of operational verbs is as follows: to solve, to apply, to compare, to characterize, to stipulate, etc. And on the last level of knowledge (or information) application in problematic situation, the list of verbs is as follows: to analyze, to evaluate, to offer, to plan, to anticipate (the idea was taken from K. Ciżkowicz and J. Ochenduszka's work).

Many of these items were used by the authors of the textbook To Lubie. In an excellent manner, they have managed with aspects of linguistic pragmatics on the basic level (to notice, to understand, to utter, to express). These are the exemplary sets of texts and exercises. In the textbook for the fourth grade, there is an excerpt from Prus's Antek under the title Antek w szkole, an excerpt from Alicja w krainie czarów (Alice in Wonderland)titled Alicja rozmawia o szkole (Alice talks about school), an extract from Przygody Tomka Sawyera (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer) titled Dać w ucho (Slap in the Ear),a fragment extracted from Jerzy Andrzejewski's story Niby gaj - without title. In the textbooks for the fifth grade, there is an excerpt from Pięcioro dzieci i coś under the title Cały kamieniołom bogactw, a fragment titled Lalka doskonała (The Perfect Doll) form Michael Ende's novel Momo. In the sixth grade, there is for instance an excerpt from M. Dąbrowska's short story Wilczęta z czarnego podwórza titled Samo życie!, a fragment titled Jeść! - wrzasnęła nagle Pulpecja from Musierowicz's Kwiat Kalafiora (in the contemporary anthologies, there are many fragments touching upon family issues taken from Musierowicz's creation) or a fragment from Robin Hood by Howard Pyle. In the first grade of junior high school, the pupils get familiarized with good world literature, e.g. excerpts from Homer, Cortazar, Tolkien, Salinger, and Shakespeare. There are also excerpts from fantasy novels (or science fiction). Based on these excerpts, we may then proceed with the following practical exercises, e.g. 1. I read and tell the biography of a celebrity (a known person) (and put the information about that person in order), 2. I introduce a celebrity (I want to arouse my younger brother's, schoolmates', trip participants' interest), 3. Will people speak one common language in the future? - consider, justify, prove - on how to discuss, 4. How to write letters: private (examples: from Jan III Sobieski to Marysieńka) and official, 5. The power of the Press (phraseological exercises), I compose advertisements with a typo (linguistic abbreviations). Linguistic exercises have a pragmatic dimension and they result from the analysis of a text, an excerpt or a particular communicational situation.⁴⁹

In each sequence of a textbook, a reference is made to a life situation that stimulates certain communicational behavior and inspires pupil's linguistic performance. The tasks connected with a given text exercise pupil's abilities and competence. On the high school level, exercises and tasks included in Grażyna Bogucka i Janusz Wojczakowski's textbook Czytać i rozumieć are also of interest. This anthology “comprises the range of interesting and generically heterogeneous texts [and excerpts] together with the set of questions and instructions which are to exercise the ability of independent and careful reading and at the same time prepare high school students for the new type of the matriculation exam, the so called reading comprehension drill” - so write the editors of the publication “Stentor”. In these sets, we find the fragment from Erich Fromm's book Mieć czy być (To Have or to Be) under the title Kochanie and the following tasks: “how many times and in which contexts does Fromm deal with the issue of marriage?, or ”describe synthetically and without direct quotations from the text, how Erich Fromm touches upon the issue of experiencing love according to the aspect of “to be” and how according to the aspect of “to have”? There is also an extract from Bruno Schulz's Sklepy cynamonowe titled Nemrod. The tasks connected with this fragment focus on the forms of narration and the practical exercise is as follows: “write a 10-sentence summary of Nemrod considering both descriptive-narrational and reflexive-philosophical layer of the text.” In the anthology Czytać i rozumieć, there are also many open questions, which become the essay topics.⁵⁰

As it shows, we may work with excerpts (extracts or fragments) in many different ways - from interpretative activities through getting an instrumental function of the literary work. I think that an appropriate literary excerpt will serve functions assigned to it on different levels of education.

NOTES

1. Florilegia (or miscellanies) - a collection of excerpts from written texts, especially works of literature. The text has been published already in Polish as Dzielo literackie i jego fragmenty, czyli o wypisach i czytankach in Dzielo literackie i jego konteksty. Ed. by T. Świętoslawska, Łodź 2001. [back]

2. We will be using the words “fragment” and “excerpt” interchangeably throughout the paper to denote a passage or segment taken from a longer literary work. [back]

3. Translation from Polish to English based on: Sławiński, J. Ed. Słownik terminów literackich. Wrocław, 1976, p. 131. Cf. Bartoszyński, K. O Fragmencie. In: Problemy teorii literatury. Seria IV. Warszawa, 1997, pp. 71-94. [back]

4. Kurska, A. The Romantic Fragment. pp. 6-31. Wrocław, 1989. See also Słownik terminów literackich, p. 131. [back]

5. Jastrun, M. Fragment i szczegół. In: Eseje wybrane. Wrocław, 1971, p. 24, after Bartoszyński, K., p. 80. op. cit. [back]

6. Ibid. [back]

7. Labuda, A. Eksplikacja fragmentu Iliady dla szkół. In: Lekcje czytania. Eksplikacje literackie. Labuda, A. W. and W. Dynak. Ed. Volume 1. Wrocław, 1989. [back]

8. Bednarek, B. Eksplikacja fragmentu Pieśni o Rolandzie dla szkół. In: ibid. [back]

9. Linde, S. B. Słownik języka polskiego. Volume 1. Part 1. Warszawa, 1807, p. 20. [back]

10. Chmielowski P. and S. Krzemiński. Ed. Złota przędza poetów i prozaików polskich. Warszawa, 1885. [back]

11. Encyclopedia Britannica. Volume 2. Chicago - London - Toronto - Genewa - Sydney, 1964. [back]

12. Sinko, T. Literatura grecka. Volume 2. Part 2. Kraków, 1948, p. 173. [back]

13. Bednarek, B. O antologii edytorskiej. In: Prace literackie XXI. Wrocław, 1981, pp. 169-170. [back]

14. Skwarczyńska, S. Kariera literacka form rodzajowych bloku silva. In: Wokół teatru i literatury (Studia i szkice), Warszawa, 1970, pp. 185-186. After Bednarek, B. O antologii edytorskiej. In Prace literackie XXI. Wrocław, 1981, pp. 169-170. [back]

15. After Bednarek, B. Ibid. “Those two elements - writes Bednarek - are two literary facts each of which is in the system of anthology recognizeable as an autonomous existence. A reservation has been formulated for reason of a visible relativity of an opposition: part - whole (e.g. an element of a cycle can be treated, depending on the context, as the whole or as a part of the whole.” [back]

16. Ibid. [back]

17. Ibid. p. 63. See also: Bednarek, B. Opracowanie edytorskie a proces komunikacji literackiej. Wybór zagadnień, p. 126. Litteraria X. Wrocław, 1978 and Dobrzyńska, T. Delimitacja textu literackiego. Wrocław, 1974. [back]

18. Trzynadlowski, J. Edytorstwo. Text, język, opracowanie. Warszawa, 1976. p. 20 and p. 29. Quoted after Bednarek, B. O antologii edytorskiej. pp. 169-170. See also Dobrzyńska, T. Tekst. Próba syntezy. “Pamiętnik literacki”, 1991, R. LXXXII, pp. 142-183, chapter Text - całościowy komunikat, pp. 151-159. [back]

19. Inglot, M. O czytance w galicyjskich podręcznikach dla niższych klas szkół elementarnych i idem, Gatunki i rodzaje literackie w galicyjskich podręcznikach do nauczania języka polskiego w szkołach elementarnych i niższych klas szkół średnich (Galicja doby autonomicznej). In: Literatura i wychowanie. Z dziejów edukacji literackiej w Galicji. Wrocław, 1983, pp. 35-95. [back]

20. The list of handbooks based on Inglot's research and Dynak and Możdżeń's bibliography - “Szkoła w kulturze literackiej XIX i XX wieku (Wrocław 1978) can be found further in this paper. [back]

21. Hasło: Czytanka. Wypisy szkolne. Skorupka, S. Ed. Warszawa, 1974, p. 937. [back]

22. I write about it in my articles Mickiewicz dla maluczkich (Mickiewicz for the Little Ones) in: Literatura i kultura popularna, t. 3, red. J. Kolbuszewski and T. Żabski, Wrocław, 1992, pp. 137-150 and Pol dla maluczkich.In: ibid, t. 6, Wrocław, 1997, pp. 75-107. [back]

23. Kobuszewski, J. Zagadnienia wartości w galicyjskich podręcznikach literatury polskiej. In: Literatura i wychowanie. Z dziejów edukacji literackiej w Galicji. Wrocław, 1983, pp. 7-34, with Inglot's introduction, p. 4. [back]

24. Dynak, W. Kanon symboliki narodowej i społecznej w galicyjskiej edukacji polonistycznej. (Napodstawie podręczników i wypisów). In: Literatura i wychowanie... pp. 37-38. [back]

25. Ibid. pp. 39-40. [back]

26. Ibid. pp. 40-42. [back]

27. Cf. I. Sikora's list of schoolbooks from 1945 through 1985, in: Literatura Młodej Polski w szkolnej edukacji polonistycznej, t. 2, Młoda Polska w szkole PRL (1945-1990), Wrocław, 1995, pp. 138-140. F. Bielak, W. Szyszkowski and A Barchard's books from 1946 and 1947 are worth consulting. [back]

28. Literatura współczesna “źle obecna w szkole.” Antologia tekstów literackich i pomocniczych dla klas maturalnych, red. B. Chrząstowska, Wrocław, 1991. See: Chrząstowska's preface, pp. 5-7. [back]

29. Mayernowa, M. R. Poetyka teoretyczna, pp. 157-258. [back]

30. Bartoszyński, K. op.cit., pp. 78-79. [back]

31. Ibid, pp. 79-80. [back]

32. Princeton, 1985. [back]

33. After ibid, p. 79. [back]

34. Ibid, p. 80. [back]

35. Dynak, W. Lektura w szkole. Z zagadnień komunikacji literackiej. Wrocław, 1978, p. 27. Also cf. Górski, K. tekstologia i edytorstwo dzieł literackich. Warszawa, 1975, p. 158. [back]

36. Chmielowski, P. Metodyka historii literatury polskiej. Warszawa, 1899. After W. Dynak. Lektura w szkole. Z zagadnień komunikacji literackiej. Wrocław, 1978, p. 27. Also cf. Górski, K. Tekstologia i edytorstwo dzieł literackich. Warszawa, 1975, p. 27. [back]

37. Próchnicki, F. Rozbiór dzieła literackiego. After W. Dynak, ibid. [back]

38. Mazanowski, M. and A. Mazanowski. Podręcznik do dziejów literatury polskiej. Kraków, 1899 [ed. 1901, 1910, 1917] and A. Mazanowski. Wypisy polskie na klasę VII gimnazjalną. Kraków, 1914 and Wypisy na VIII klasę gimnazjalną. Kraków, 1914. [back]

39. Dynak, W. ibid, p. 29. [back]

40. Próchnicki, F. Wskazówki do nauki języka polskiego. Na podstawie obrad komisji, wybranej przez Towarzystwo Nauczycieli Szkół Wyższych. Lwów, 1885, p. 16. [back]

41. Dynak, W. ibid. Dynak quotes Wóycicki's opinion based on Wóycicki's work: Rozbiór literacki w szkole. Podręcznik dla nauczycieli. Warszawa, 1921. [back]

42. Chrząstowska, B. and S. Wysłouch. Poetyka stosowana. 2^nd ed modified. Warszawa, 1987, pp. 503-508. and Chrząstowska, B. Lektura i poetyka. Warszawa, 1987. See chapters on the “art of interpretation”. [back]

43. Dynak, W. and A. W. Labuda. Ed. Lekcje czytania. Eksplikacje literackie. Part 1. Warszawa, 1991, p. 7 and p. 13. [back]

44. Wyka, K. Adam Mickiewicz, “Reduta Ordona.” In: Prokop, J. and J. Sławiński. Ed. Liryka polska. Interpretacje. Kraków, 1988, p. 73 and p. 74. [back]

45. Lekcje czytania. Ibid, pp. 13-14. [back]

46. Lekcje czytania, p. 18. [back]

47. Lekcje czytania, p. 18. [back]

48. Bednarek, B. O fragmencie edytorskim. Prace literackie. Wrocław, 1979, p. 233. [back]

49. Podręczniki do języka polskiego: To lubię. Książka ucznia (fourth grade) Z. A. Kłakówna, B. Dyduch, M Jędrychowska, (5^th, 6^th grade (primary school) and 1^st grade of junior high school - M. Jędrychowska, A. Kłakówna, Ćwiczenia językowe (4^th, 5^th, 6^th grade) - H. Mrazek, I Steczko, 1^st grade of junior high school H. Mrazek, I. Steczko. [back]

50. Bogucka, G. and J. Wojczakowski. Czytać i rozumieć. Ćwiczenia i zadania dla uczniów szkół średnich. Warszawa, 2000. [back]

© Dorota Michułka
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© Електронно издателство LiterNet, 09.11.2005
Адаптацията като стратегия на детската литература. / Adaptation as a Strategy of Children's Literature. Съст. и ред. Маргарита Славова. Варна: LiterNet, 2005.