Contemporary Polish Essays: In Search of the Aura of Paintings and Photographs

Abstract

When an essay, as a specific form of writing, is conventionally compared to travel, the latter is understood not only as a model of translocation but also as a literary genre. The parallel between essays and travel writings identifies their numerous common elements in text, for instance a movement between the topics, the observer’s visible distance, an intellectual journey (the last term was introduced by Walter Pater in his pioneer reflections on the essay in 1893). The listed similarities encourage the writer of this article to formulate a rudimentary statement: both real and literary travel and the act of writing an essay are usually undertaken to discover a thing worth one’s attention and interest; a thing that, even if commonly known, should be, firstly, experienced, and secondly, depicted in a way that would cast new light on it.