Korczak, emphatic genres and the voices of “petit people”. Cultural studies inspirations

Abstract

This text is inspired by the interwar pedagogical and literary writings of Janusz Korczak. In the article, I try to prove that he was an author who, in the face of social and political crisis, designed new discursive genres, which I would call “empathic genres.” Korczak’s project of new forms of pedagogical writing was closely related to his philosophy of education and its ethical implications. It was to revise established ways of thinking and acting through its own content, but above all its form. Its aim was to dehegemonize and decentralize expert discourses, which is what later humanities focused on the question of what it means to write humanistic texts and how humanities can be practiced other than by creating epistemologically authoritarian representation. I would therefore like to treat Korczak’s texts as an inspiration that is important for the dilemmas of contemporary cultural studies and, more broadly, contemporary humanities.