Ewelina Sasin

Borrowing tools from Pierre Bourdieu's theory of class struggle, the authors of the article analyze strategies of declassation on the example of the biography of the writer Jan Krasnowolski, and study the effects of this decision on both his texts and the construction of his image. The process of class change, of going from the privileged position of intelligentsia to the position of the working class, is presented as a kind of conscious (in a way also esthetic) choice, motivated by factors like the will to acquire new experience that is inaccessible to the higher classes. The authors of the article analyze literary texts by Krasnowolski (consistent minimalism as opposed to sublime excess; masculine, stereotypically presented topics), their adherence to genres (lad lit, a kind of literature for men), as well as the author's interviews and statements, and paratexts like biographical notes on the covers of books. Other tools used for the analysis of the phenomenon of declassation include the findings of the empirical research on classes in Polish society after 1989 conducted by Maciej Gdula.

This article aims for determining the role and operating methods of literary agents who appeared as new actors within the structure of Polish literature after 1989. It presents relations between literature and business within the context of cooperation between agents and writers, the latter using the former’s services as a means for their functioning in the Polish publishing market that strives for professionalization. The theme of the article is a literary agent as a writer’s alter ego: on the one hand, overshadowed by the writer, but on the other – still considerably influencing their client’s economic, marketing and legal situation.
This dissertation uses terminology and analytical tools developed by Pierre Bourdieu presented in his paper Rules of Art. The paper shall be based on an analysis of six in-depth interviews with literary agents as well as on results of a research report developed within the framework of the project entitled Literatura polska po 1989 roku w świetle teorii Pierre’a Bourdieu (Polish literature after 1989 in light of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory).
 

This report is part of a larger research project entitled Polish literature after 1989 in light of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory led by a team of sociologists, experts in culture studies and literary scholars. The authors use Bourdieu’s theoretical tools to describe a segment of the Polish literary field, focusing on different aspects of the production, distribution and sales of books. Based on collected materials (353 interviews with individuals from the analyzed field – publishers, distributors, booksellers, government workers – published by Biblioteka Analiz in the series Rozmowy o rynku książki [pl. Conversations about the Book Market] in the years 2001–2012), the authors aim to describe the process of the emergence of a professional publishing industry from the ephemeral and chaotic publishing movement of the 1990s. The authors analyze a number of aspects of the transition from publishing movement to book market – from book design and the editorial level through print run planning, marketing the book, displaying and selling it, to issues such as printing the price on the cover and the introduction of VAT on books. Using the definition of the term “book market” proposed by Marek Tobera and Bogdan Klukowski, the authors argue that in the first years after the political transformation in Poland a professional book market did not exist, due to the lack of a professionalized system of information exchange between the sectors of production, distribution and sales. It was only with the advent of computerization that the evolution of a professional book market gained momentum.