Dorota Kozicka

What Does It Mean to Be a Polish Art Critic Today?
The discussion on the topic of contemporary literary criticism has been contained within two symbolic poles: the article What does it mean today to be a Polish writer by Karol Maliszewski written in 1995 and What does it mean today to be a Polish authoress, written in 2008 by Igor Stokfiszewski. The former paper, which is characteristic of the critical-literary awareness of the 90s of the 20th century, promotes literature that is far from being involved and is based on an individual writer’s gesture; the latter, on the other hand, belongs to one of the better known critical projects of recent years and it promotes a political turnaround proclaiming literature that is engagé and one that is treated as an instrument of social critique.
The project of literary criticism is at the same time an expressive and controversial proposition and its significance also consists in the fact that it became a strong impulse which mobilized literary criticism to define and defend other conceptions of literature and criticism and in this way contribute to a fundamental debate in the milieu of critics.

The fantastic writers, or how the writers of fantastic prose fiction conquer Polish literature

This article discusses the transition of science fiction literature over the last twenty five years and the specificity of this literature in relation to contemporary Polish prose. It deals also with the phenomenon of certain writers leaving the ghetto of sci-fi and fantasy prose and being introduced into the mainstream literature and their influence on the condition/position of Polish literature

The Literary Critic in the Polish People’s Republic

The essay entitled The Literary Critic in the Polish People’s Republic constitutes an attempt to answer the fundamental question: how one is to present and describe today the Polish literary criticism in the second half of the twentieth century. The essay illustrates that it is worth going beyond the widely accepted view concerning the political and social enslavement of critics and to look at their writings as expressions functioning within an internal system of literary life, accompanied by internal conflicts, myths and hierarchies. For not all of these writings have their origin in the current political system (although they must always refer to the mandatory public discourse). One of the examples of a different than merely a political point of reference here is the moralistic, Catholic self-censorship; another example is the need to define one’s attitude toward the critical-literary tradition, defined above all by such people as Brzozowski and Irzykowski. The acceptance of the inner perspective of a critical expression transfers the whole problem onto the plane of dual reference which is (at all times) a characteristic feature of literary criticism: namely the reference to literature and what is literary and towards “life”, i.e. the sphere of politics, moral choices etc., and to a lack of autonomy as the fundamental issue of the existence of literary criticism.