Andrzej Niewiadomski

(Non)critical orderings? On Dorota Kozicka’s book Critical (Dis)orders. A Study on Contemporary Literary Criticism in Poland.
The book by Dorota Kozicka entitled Critical (Dis)orders. A Study on Contemporary Liter-ary Criticism in Poland contributes a number of new and signifi cant ideas to the investigative discussions on the mechanisms of literary criticism. As a starting point, the author accepts a wide awareness of metacriticism, and assumes a metacritical perspective to order many and various critical discussions and attitudes of the last halfcentury (with anticipations). Fol-lowing the reinterpretations of Polish modern literary criticism traditions, she observes how in the altered cultural and communicative situation of postmodernity, the roles and functions of the critics alternate, and how they sign in to miscellaneous social and political discourses. The author’s contemplation heads for an impossible synthesis, comprising, in a dichotomous or-der, both the autonomy of critical operation and the dialogical dimension of critical self-reflection.

In the current research considerations devoted to the early work of Czesław Miłosz, the importance of his second poetic collection, Trzy zimy (in English: Three Winters), has been repeatedly emphasized. However, there was no analysis that would focus on attempts to define more precisely the meaning of Trzy zimy in the context of development processes within Polish literary modernism.The article is an interpretative approach concentrating not on individual poems, but on the whole creative intention of Milosz from 1936. This volume, seen as an ingeniously composed whole, and read in confrontation with the author's programmatic statements, presents itself as an important caesura closing the stage of early modernist Polish poetry, benefiting from various aesthetic inspirations and producing a somewhat modified version of "pure poetry" compared to the proposals of Western literature.

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 literature 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.