W poszukiwaniu kwiatu nietoty. „Literatura kopalna” a paleobotanika

Abstract

In Search of the Nietota Flower. „Fossil Literature” and Paleobotany The article focuses on the issues of paleontology, the science of plant fossils, with particular emphasis on paleobotanical threads devoted to fossil vegetation, which in the 19th century was closely related to philology, represented both by the science of literature and language. The author extracts the notions of “fossil literature” (Adam Mickiewicz) and “fossil poetry” (Ralph Waldo Emerson), pointing to their particular relationship with “paleobotany of the unconscious” (Kazimierz Wyka), presented from the psychoanalytic perspective (Eduard von Hartmann, Carl Gustav Jung, Charles Baudouin) as an archetype of collective, interspecies memory, reaching back to some common ancestor and root cause reminding us of the eternal coexistence of the organic and the inorganic, plant and animal, human and non-human. The author also draws attention to the ecological and ecocritical aspects of the fossil literature, which he perceives as the trace fossils of human life activity (ichnofossils), which make up the meta-layer of the Anthropocene.