Broadly understood comparative research is among the most important intellectual challenges of the coming years. Translation work; the search for commensurate and effective tools of communication; an analysis of intercultural experiences, also including those that present the process of the constitution of various communities (with the national community at the forefront) in a new light; and the overcoming of the non-befitting of language to reality all today have a thoroughly practical nature and concern every participant in culture who consciously and effectively wants to act within it

Broadly understood comparative research is among the most important intellectual challenges of the coming years. Translation work; the search for commensurate and effective tools of communication; an analysis of intercultural experiences, also including those that present the process of the constitution of various communities (with the national community at the forefront) in a new light; and the overcoming of the non-befitting of language to reality all today have a thoroughly practical nature and concern every participant in culture who consciously and effectively wants to act within it. Hitherto developed comparative tools can be used for the challenges placed before us by the next phase of globalization, because in it the universal mobility of the users of culture become "complemented" with the experience of "crippling" within the boundaries of various social and political institutions. In light of the discipline's rich history, comparative literature, like no other field of the humanities, is fit for analysis, description, as well as the crossing of these crippling institutional and ideological boundaries, which with increasing strength are making known their presence in the public sphere and to an increasing degree determine our way of functioning in culture (or in a mediatised world subject to processes that make sense of things).

The very history of comparative studies still lacks deepened research, which the authors of this project do not forget for even a moment. It is not enough to show comparative tools developed elsewhere in the Polish milieu. It is necessary to utilise them for scrupulous studies of the Polish national heritage not to undertake an artificial revitalisation of this heritage with the help of fashionable theories, but so as to find in this tradition those cultural resources that can assist the process of comprehending approaching social-political changes and the negotiation of their own place in global systems in the era of their prominence, both from the individual, as well as communal perspective. In other words, comparative studies (which in their nature are situated towards the future) have considerable significance for analysis, reading and the translation of experience recorded in cultural texts. Thanks to them it is possible to flip through the bridge between the past and local cultural phenomena, and the more-than-local processes of communication.

      The vectors of comparative studies thus go in two directions: in those of the past and provincialism, as well as in the direction of the future and universality, which for us are an existential and political challenge. The project presented below reaches for the best traditions of the discipline, which consist of research and the confrontation of two distinct discourses with the help of which we describe the world. It utilises the rich tradition of combining studies of the word, sound and visuals; and the juxtaposition of languages developed to describe various types of human experiences (aesthetic, ethical, political, social, religious, etc). It is worth remembering before the now well known to us ambitions of cultural studies had crystallised, comparative literature was precisely one of the most ardent advocates of interdisciplinary dialogue and broadly conceived research on testimonies of human expression. Also today comparative literature boldly looks towards the future, venturing into increasingly vast areas of the humanities and the achievement of the "translation revolution" that took place within it in recent decades. The humanities as a certain whole should incessantly be the horizon of the thought of the discipline, which makes the observation of its internal and external boundaries one of its aims (precisely this aim explicitly shows the history of comparative literature in the United States, where there took place a significant part of the battle for the contemporary academe and the model of education undertaken in it).

As part of the project Literatura narodowa wobec nowoczesnej komparatystyki: reprezentacje, interpretacje, translacje ("National Literature and Contemporary Comparative Studies: Representations, Interpretations, Translations), the following endeavours have been undertaken:

The book Polityka wrażliwości. Wprowadzenie do humanistyki  ("The Politics of Sensitivity: An Introduction to the Humanities) by Michał Paweł Markowski. Despite its title, it is not a textbook, but a monographic recognition of the situation in which the humanities have currently found themselves, which is especially significant from the point of view of this project researching the national heritage. The intensive discussion about the status, reach and institutional fixing of the humanities that for years has been ongoing mostly in the United States, but also gradually in Poland as well, requires thinking about the reformulating of the basic aims of the humanities and confronting them with the contemporary cultural situation. This book is based on four main theses. First of all, the humanities are not a science in the same sense as the natural sciences. Nearly everything differentiates it from these sciences, from the form of social legitimisation and the organisation of discourse, to the validation of the results of research and the rules regarding financing. Second, the humanities are rooted in a completely distinct historical-cultural tradition than the natural sciences, evidence of which is its complete distinctness. Third, the contemporary humanities repeat the dilemmas already present in Kant's philosophy and concerning distinct cognitive faculties. The fact that discussion about the humanities cannot end means that it shares the fate of a much broader contemporary project whose ambivalence is simultaneously its weakness and its driving force. Fourth and finally, The Politics of Sensitivity attempts to show how sensitivity can be defined anew as a hermeneutic stance that should be the basis of the humanities. The book is based on a rich analysis of both the traditions of the humanities, which reaches back to the end of the eighteenth century, as well as the contemporary critical voices (which are mostly French and American) with regards to the position of the humanities in the contemporary university. The analysis rendered in this book is undertaken from the point of view of literary sstudies (the author's maternal discipline), and for this reason it shows the comparative contexts of this discipline and at the same time is a voice in the discussion about the contemporary status of science as well as the social and political situation of academic teaching.