The article presents the results of analyses aimed at capturing the significance of bricolage emerging from its uses in scientific research practice. The main point of my interest are scientific conceptualizations of the concept of bricolage relating to the practice of defining, characterizing and embedding its meaning in existing theoretical approaches. The empirical basis of the analysis is confined to a set of 47 scientific articles which contain the concept of bricolage in their titles, abstracts, and keywords. Collecting these articles involved searching through such bibliographic databases as Web of Science, Scopus, Wiley, and the Polish National Library Catalogue. The direction of the analysis was inductive and emergent, subordinated to such research issues as: 1. what meanings of bricolage emerge from its use in scientific research practice? 2. how researchers justify the possibility of using bricolage in the practice of social and humanistic research? 3. what theoretical concepts are responsible for creating its meaning? Answering these questions has led me to a reconstruction of three conceptions of bricolage: epistemological bricolage, methodological bricolage, and hybrid bricolage.

The article is devoted to the coverage of the problem of bricolage as a method of memory reconstruction in the novel “Austerlitz” by the greatest German writer Winfried Sebald. The article notes that “Austerlitz” marks the transition from trauma to conscious identity as part of the historical memory of the Holocaust. It shows how the hero of the work, Jacques Austerlitz, acquires his identity by assembling from scattered information his personal history, reflecting a significant part of the collective tragedy. The genre feature of the work as a travelogue, memoir, investigation, as literature bordering on documentary and artistic experience, where the real is combined with the fictional, is highlighted. The article describes in detail the content of the technique of bricolage as a form of “wild”, “pre-rational” way of thinking, as a technique of fitting auxiliary materials (old photographs, newspaper clippings), a montage of disparate episodes, the technique of collage. The structure of the work’s storytelling is analyzed when the narrator does not tell the story but describes what he hears from Jacques Austerlitz. It is as if it is not a text, but the story itself, which someone tells, and also shows pictures for authenticity. The functions of the hero in the novel gradually shift from people to things, documents, bearers of the memory of individual and collective civilizational catastrophe. These indescribable witnesses break the blockade of traumatic silence around the childhood of Austerlitz, embodied in images of blindness, dumbness, oblivion. Before the protagonist of the work, the “man without a past,” the history of his family, the ghostly happy childhood that was rudely cut short by the separation from his biological parents, is suddenly revealed. Sebald demonstrates a contemporary form of novel narrative in which the truthfulness of the Holocaust narrative is revealed by incorporating the exile’s personal authorial biography, pain, and guilt into the memory of this tragedy. The role of photographs and descriptions of architectural structures in revealing the immanent semantic content of the subject, not manifested verbally, is analyzed. The latter is the key document that unites and structures the important for the writer themes of memories, memory, indifference, oblivion, return to the ghostly past, overcoming of the psychological trauma. Based on the analysis the author concludes that the attitude to the reader as a co-author brings Sebald’s novel closer to the tradition of the European intellectual novel and postmodern hypertexts, in which meaningful units are not presented in a traditional linear sequence, but as a multiplicity of links and transitions. The author notes that the acute experience of humanitarian catastrophe, the multilayered text, the density of meaningful meanings make this work a notable phenomenon in the context of artistic comprehension of traumatic memory.

Tinkering (with) bricolage. Reconstruction of selected philosophical and methodological assumptions of Joe L. Kincheloe’s concept

The bricolage as philosophical inquiry is a critical-constructivist research perspective proposed by Joe L. Kincheloe. It’s practical implementation assumes the use of various philosophical tools to help clarify the process of inquiry and provide insight into the assumptions on which it conceptually rests (Kincheloe, 2008). The considerations undertaken in this article are aimed at the characteristic of the philosophical and methodological assumptions that co-create it. Their reflective reception determines the possibility of a reliable use of the bricolage in the practice of academic research. The undertaken reconstruction was directed by the following research question: What epistemological – ontological – methodological preconditions make up the practice of research using the bricolage, in line with Kincheloe’s concept? Its material basis was the collection of books and articles listed in the bibliography. A detailed, though certainly not exhaustive answer to the research problem posed is presented in three thematically separated parts of the article. In chapters one and two, I describe the epistemology and ontology of complexity. In chapter three, I draw attention to an active view of research methodology. The contents presented in the article, although thematically arranged, intertwine, leading to the representation of selected aspects of the bricolage.