Why the History of Polish Literature of the Last Thirty Years Will Never be Written

The article deals with attempts by literary critics and literary historians to order Polish iterature of the last thirty years. It points to the low operational value of the categories and terms used by researchers when trying to define the most important features of literature of that period. Periodization that pinpoints the literary breakthrough to the year 1989 cannot be such a sorting order, nor can it be the category of literary generation or the distinction between modernist and postmodern literature in Poland. An attempt to create the history of literature on the thirtieth anniversary of the political breakthrough encounters significant difficulties connected mainly with the fact that there is no identifiable closing event for that period. The first steps towards a reliable description should be, although it is a very difficult task, to give up used terminology, diversify research reflection and introduce a broader historical perspective going back beyond 1989.  

Noncontemporaneity. On the Possible History of Polish Literature after 1989

Temporal and historical frames usually applied to the description of recent Polish literature gradually lose their potential. “Postmodernism,” “late modernism,” and other terms do not reveal the complicated and local temporal landscape of this literature. Processes like the traumatic return of past events (WWII, the Holocaust, Stalinist terror), the simultaneous activity of Polish language writers in countries around the world, immigrant writings, etc., preclude the use of the term “contemporaneity,” since they do not create any shared temporal horizon and belong to processes of different temporal dynamics with separate time rhythms. Rather, they belong to the dimension of “noncontemporaneity” or “asynchrony.” “Noncontemporaneity” is both the general perspective of the latest literature and the experience of the main characters presented by the literary works. 

Poetry and Image, Literacy and Visuality after 1989

The article traces the history of the relationship between linguistic (textual, verbal, discursive) elements and graphic, visual, and pictorial elements in Polish poetry after 1989. The subject of interest here are various phenomena, such as: artistic books (by Natalia Malek, Kira Pietrek, and Justyna Bargielska), reference to painting/film/ photography, experiments with visual and verbal representation, using a language mark/text by visual artists. The goal is not so much to catalog the relationships between text and image, but to describe the difference between artistic activities in the era of intermedia (twentieth-century avant-garde) and artistic activities in the era of transmedia.

Poets-Translators as the “Avant-Garde” of the 1990s

David Lehman in his book The Last Avant-Garde. The Making of the New York School of Poets sustains the avant-garde character of the New York School (painters and poets), pointing to the resistance of the public to their works as to one of the symptoms showing their anti-normative and emancipatory message. New experimental poetry in post-transformational Poland of the 1990s was, in general, following the innovations of foreign neo-avant-garde practices – in respect to the methods, interests, and creative ideas. The New York School tradition became the main source of inspiration, due to its reception by poets-translators of the circle of “Literatura na Świecie” magazine: Piotr Sommer, Bohdan Zadura, Andrzej Sosnowski, and Tadeusz Pióro. This article shows that their literary statements on art, which could be seen as programmatic in the avant- -garde way, displayed certain outlines similar to the New York School ideas. One might risk the thesis that at the turn of the centuries in Poland not only American neo-avant-garde poetry aroused the interest of Polish poets-translators. Also the programme of the New York School poets, however vague, became important for their experience and it was being “translated” alongside the poems, though its features would turn out different in Polish conditions.

Literary Communication and the Network Society. Examples in Recent Polish Poetry

This article outlines the impact of changes in social structures on literary communication in contemporary Polish poetry. The author, using tools borrowed from sociology (Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory and Manuel Castells’s concept of network society), analyzes the communication structures in poetry published after 2012. Among the quoted and interpreted poetic books are Pamięć zewnętrzna by Radosław Jurczak, Animalia by Anna Adamowicz, Pamiętne statusy by Łukasz Podgórni, HWDP jako miejsce na ziemi by Tomasz Pułk, and Wiersze organiczne by Kacper Bartczak.

A Weird Inkling, As If the World Was Ending. Arguments for a New Periodisation

The article examines the idea of year 2008 – the beginning of the so-called Great Recession – as a potential turning point in contemporary Polish poetry. Most of the authors commonly associated with the so-called “new Polish political poetry” have published their first books around 2008, and it was also around that year that the work of certain important young authors seems to have shifted from a relatively traditional form to a more experimental one, allowing them to accurately grasp the anxiety and precariousness inherently tied to the social experience of the young generation. I link these shifts to the issue of reference and dereferentialisation of sign/language under financial capitalism. Whereas pre-2008, the dereferentialisation of language might have seemed like an ongoing and somewhat ambivalent process, for the young generation it constitutes the very foundation of their everyday existence.

Literary Criticism after Literature

The article is focused on literary criticism within the post-literary formation. The author describes it in the historical and cultural perspective of institutional changes and the consequences of different ways of defining literature and its functions. The term “post-literary” is used here to name the present condition of literature incorporated into cyberculture. This inclusion results not only in traditional readership ceasing to function as a privileged reading practice, but above all in dehierarchisation, heteronomisation, deprofessionalisation and egalitarianisation of literature (the changeability of sender and recipient roles; ease of publishing; change of text intelligibility and dispossession of literature from an earmarked discursive space). Therefore, the circulation and the very status of literary criticism has also evolved. The author shows that the literary criticism that has emerged from the experience of the new media is not only entertainment oriented and that it does not have to be non-intellectual. He gives a detailed description of the key differences between traditional and new criticism.