Must a critic be loved? : on narcissist inclinations of literary critics

In her lecture concerning contemporary literary criticism the author shows a subtle but fundamental diff erence between personal/subjective signature of a critic trying to penetrate and understand a literary work and a narcissist attitude, in which a text is like a mirror refl ecting desires and wishes of the critic himself. The comparison of diff erent attitudes and models of a critical subject in a critical sketch, in a metacritical polemical text and in a critical book will serve this purpose. In the last case the object of comparison will be: Kazimierz Wyka’s A Matter of Imagination, in which he declares that ‘it is not supposed to be a document of development of some Kazimierz Wyka (...) but simply a document or a contribution to the development of Polish poetry...’: ‘An Appetite for Change by Jerzy Jarzębski - a collection of critical essays treated by the author as a collection of sketches on signifi cant issues and literary works (but here the author places two sketches ‘rather to ‘take a closer look at himself’ as well as procedures of understanding and evaluation of texts used with these early readings’); and Dariusz Nowacki’s Career: A Reader, which was designed as ‘a stage of his own biography as a reader’. It is interesting to examine at the same time how a narcissist attitude aff ects the character of contemporary literary criticism; what benefi ts and dangers resulting from this attitude are, and also (perhaps primarily) what place literature holds in the ‘narcissist’ type of criticism