The Laboratory and the Archive: Researching the History of Literary Scholarship

Markowska-Fulara explores the rather little-known Vilnius manuscripts associated with Leon Borowski. She describes them and identifies them as passages of a translation of Cervantes' Don Quixote as well as of Johann Joachim Eschenburg's treatise Entwurf einer Theorie und Literatur der schonen Redekunste. To contextualise Borowski's work Markowska-Fulara presents documents that concern him as well as discussions (by Jan Sniadecki and Gottfried Ernst Groddeck) on literary scholarship. This leads to a theoretical exploration of the "text" as a "literary scholarly fact": the postulated dual aspects of researching it, the process of constructing it and the conditions of its circulation among scholars.