Textualization of Experience

The book is an analysis of Greek Hellenistic literature with the help of conceptual tools of cultural studies and media theory. Its main aim is to describe the cultural process during which Greek authors in the 4th and 3rd centuries B.C. made the “textualization of experience", that is, transferred phenomenalistically understood qualities of human sensory experience to the categories characteristic for textual description – as far as possible for them. This process is shown by examples from the works of Xenophon, Aristotle, Theophrastus, Philitas of Kos and Archimedes. The author also tries to show some of the consequences that the phenomenon of the Hellenistic textualization of experience had for the later epochs of European culture.

Paweł Majewski, professor at the University of Warsaw. His books concern the influence of means of communication on the formation of cultural systems (Writing, Text, Literature, Warsaw 2013; The Speaking Lion, Warsaw 2018; The Feast of the Language, Warsaw 2019) and the works of Stanisław Lem (Between an Animal and a Machine. Technological Utopia of Stanisław Lem, Peter Lang 2018).